Some 300 Pakistani soldiers, the last contingent of what was once the world's largest peacekeeping operation helping one of the poorest countries on earth recover from a decade of horrific civil war, on Thursday left Sierra Leone.
Four years on from the brutal 1991-2001 conflict which cost some 120,000 lives and left thousands mutilated, the UN Security Council in June judged conditions in the country to have improved sufficiently to end a UN mission mandate there on December 31.
The Pakistani soldiers left from the capital Freetown's Lungi airport on a flight bound for Islamabad.