RAMADI, Iraq - Revelers at the wedding party said they began worrying when they heard aircraft overhead at about 9 p.m. With jets still overhead two hours later, they told the band to stop playing and everyone went to bed.

"We began to expect some kind of catastrophe," said Madhi Nawaf, who lives in the area near Mogr el-Deeb on the Syrian border.

The first bomb hit well after midnight and the barrage didn't stop until nearly sunrise, witnesses told The Associated Press. In the end, up to 45 people were killed in the attack Wednesday, mostly women and children from the Bou Fahad tribe.

"Mothers died with their children in their arms," said Nawaf. One was his daughter. "I found her a few steps from the house, her 2-year-old son Raad in her arms. Her 1-year-old son, Raed, was lying nearby, missing his head."

The United States has insisted the target was a safehouse for infiltrators slipping across the border to fight coalition soldiers in Iraq. In Baghdad, Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, coalition deputy chief of operations, repeated that claim Thursday, but said the U.S. military would investigate after Iraqi officials reported the survivors' story.

Kimmitt said several shotguns, handguns, Kalashnikov rifles and machine guns were found at the site. And he said soldiers also found jewelry and vehicles that indicated the people were not wandering Bedouin but "town dwellers."

"Ten miles from the Syrian border and 80 miles from the nearest city and a wedding party? Don't be naive," Marine Maj. Gen. James N. Mattis told reporters in Fallujah. "Plus, they had 30 males of military age with them. How many people go to the middle of the desert to have a wedding party?"

But members of the Bou Fahad tribe say they consider the border area part of their territory and follow their goats, sheep and cattle there to graze. They leave spacious homes in Ramadi and roam the desert, as far as 250 miles to the west, in the springtime.

Smuggling livestock into Syria is also part of a herdsman's life - although no one in the tribe admitted to that.

Weddings are often marked in Iraq with celebratory gunfire. However, survivors insisted no weapons were fired Wednesday, despite speculation by Iraqi officials that this drew a mistaken American attack.

The survivors insist the Americans were wrong to target them.

"They're lying," Nawaf said. "They have to show us evidence that we fired a shot or were hiding foreign fighters. Where are the foreign fighters then? Why kill and dismember innocent children?"

Nawaf and more than a dozen men from the Bou Fahad tribe transported the dead to Ramadi, capital of Anbar province, which includes Mogr el-Deeb. Twenty-eight graves were dug in the tribe's cemetery outside Ramadi, each containing one to three bodies. A wake was held Thursday at a home in Ramadi.

Nawaf's brother, Taleb, lost his wife, Amal, and two daughters, 2-year-old Anoud and 1-year-old Kholood. His wife's body was found clutching the two children, survivors said.