Canadian veteran soldiers who served with the United Nations Peacekeeping force on a war-divided Cyprus, look at an abandoned passenger aircraft, at the derelict Nicosia airport located inside the UN-controlled buffer zone on the capital's outskirts on Tuesday, March 18, 2014. A gutted Cyprus Airways Trident passenger jet a stone’s throw away from the terminal serves a reminder of the fierce battles that had raged there in July, 1974. Advancing Turkish forces had tried to seize the strategically important airport on the capital’s western outskirts, hours in to their invasion of Cyprus that was triggered by a coup aimed at uniting the island with Greece. Canadian soldiers then serving with the United Nations Peacekeeping force in Cyprus _ or UNFICYP _ helped repel the advance. Since then, it’s been the force’s headquarters midway through a 180 kilometer (112 mile) buffer zone that splits this ethnically divided island into a breakaway Turkish Cypriot north and a internationally recognized, Greek Cypriot south. Thousands of soldiers from 32 countries have donned the UN blue beret in Cyprus over half a century in what has become the longest serving peacekeeping force of its kind. Some 178 lost their lives here. (AP Photo/Petros Karadjias)
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