It is one of the most hostile environments on earth and it has been the scene of many bloody battles, but with a fragile truce in place between Ethiopia and Eritrea, the United Nations Security Council has voted unanimously that its peacekeeping mission to the frontier comes to an end on Thursday. However, skirmishes between the Horn of Africa nations continue and analysts predict it is probably only a matter of time before Christian Ethiopia and Muslim Eritrea resume full-scale fighting. “The United Nations is withdrawing without having been able to assist the two countries in finding a common ground in spite of having tried all to achieve it,” said Belgian Ambassador to the U.N. Jan Grauls, who sponsored the resolution to terminate the peacekeeping mission. The international forces played more of a monitoring role rather than intervening between the two states.