Celia Hatton

UNESCO's verified damage to 145 religious, historic and cultural sites since the start of the war, including Roman cemeteries, the ruins of early churches and an ancient Greek port.

It will be a long time before any meaningful restoration can take place.

But the start of work marks a step forwards.

Yolande Nell, to the U.S.

now, where the Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is facing sustained political pressure.

Much of it centers around his involvement in a September attack on what the U.S.

says was a drug smuggling boat in the Caribbean.

After the initial hit on the boat, two survivors left clinging to wreckage were killed in a follow-on strike.

The White House has already said Mr. Hegseth authorized the attacks but did not give the order to kill.

To clarify exactly what happened, the man in command of the operation, Admiral Frank Bradley, has shown a select group of U.S.

lawmakers an unedited video of the incident.

Admiral Bradley has also backed up the Trump administration's account, saying that he was the one who ordered the second strike on the boat.

After the briefing, a visibly upset Democrat congressman, Jim Himes, told the media that he was horrified by what he'd seen.

But the Republican Senator Tom Cotton, who also watched the footage, said he'd seen nothing illegal and called them righteous strikes.

He also gave perhaps the most detailed description yet of what appears to have happened.

So what exactly did lawmakers see and hear in this briefing?

Our North America correspondent is Peter Bowes.

This was a closed-door meeting for members of Congress from both the House of Representatives and the Senate, high-ranking members from the relevant committees, so the Armed Services Committee, the Senate Intelligence Committee.

They were shown classified, unedited video footage of the strikes, which happened on September 2nd.

This is the strike that involved the two survivors attempting to climb back onto the boat, and the briefing shows