ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistan’s army claimed yesterday to have routed Taliban militants in a stronghold near the Afghan border but turned up no sign of Osama bin Laden or Al Qaeda no. 2 Ayman al-Zawahri.

The government ordered a halt to the operation to allow some of the 300,000 families who fled airstrikes and combat in the Bajur region to return home for the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

However, officials reported that troops fired on militants seen moving toward a security post late yesterday, and that stray mortar shells killed at least two civilians.

American officials recently stepped up calls for Pakistan to put more pressure on militants using bases in its remote tribal areas to mount crossborder attacks also on NATO and government troops in Afghanistan.

Some analysts have warned that the pause in the weeks-long Bajur operation would only allow the militants to regroup.

Pakistani officials said yesterday, however, that their forces had killed some 560 Pakistani and foreign fighters and thwarted a push to make Bajur into a militant fortress.

Army spokesman Major General Athar Abbas said about 20 members of the security forces died and 30 were missing.

“In our view, the back has been broken,” Mr. Abbas told the Associated Press. “Main leaders are on the run and the people of the area are now openly defying whatever the militants had achieved there.”

Officials including the former president of Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf, have mentioned Bajur as a possible hiding place for Mr. bin Laden or Mr. Zawahri.

Mr. Abbas said many foreigners were reportedly in Bajur before the operation, but that many had probably fled to Afghanistan or other parts of Pakistan’s northwest and that the operation had turned up no trace of the Al Qaeda chiefs.

The chief of the Interior Ministry, Rehman Malik, said yesterday that authorities also received a report that Mr. Zawahri’s wife had been in the neighboring tribal region of Mohmand.

Pakistani forces stormed the location but didn’t find the couple, he said, without indicating when the raid took place. He said Mr. Zawahri moved between Mohmand and the Afghan provinces of Kunar and Paktika.

Mr. Malik accused the Afghan government of “inefficiency” for letting many of the estimated 3,000 militants who had gathered in Bajur flee over the frontier.

Pakistan’s five-month-old government initially held peace talks with Taliban and Al Qaeda-linked militants living in mountainous border regions.