Turkey’s foreign ministry said it summoned the US Ambassador to Ankara over President Joe Biden’s recognition of the 1915 massacres of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire as a genocide, adding it had conveyed Turkey’s “strong reaction”.
Biden said on Saturday that the 1915 killings constituted genocide, a historic declaration that infuriated Turkey and further strained frayed ties between the two NATO allies, Reuters reported.
In a statement, the ministry said deputy foreign minister Sedat Onal had told US Ambassador David Satterfield that the statement had no legal basis and that Ankara “rejected it, found it unacceptable and condemned in the stongest terms”.
It said the statement had caused a “wound in ties that will be hard to repair”.
