US President Joe Biden spoke by telephone with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Friday night.

Iran Press/America: The White House in a statement said that the presidents of the United States and Turkey agreed on the phone call to meet on the sidelines of the upcoming NATO summit in Brussels in June.

The telephone conversation took place as the White House sought to recognize the Ottoman-era Armenian genocide.

Western media quoted an informed source as saying that Joe Biden had informed Erdogan by telephone that he intended to recognize the 1915 massacre of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire as genocide.

Relations between Ankara and Washington have been strained in recent months.

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu recently referred to the US intention to recognize the killings of Armenians as genocide, saying that if the Americans want relations to deteriorate, it is up to them.

According to some documents, about 1.5 million Armenians were massacred in Turkey in 1915 at the end of the Ottoman Empire.

Turkey always rejects the term "genocide" for this massacre.

Turkey acknowledges that a large number of Armenians were killed during the Ottoman Empire during World War the first in clashes with the Ottoman army, but denies the statistics provided by the Armenians and the organization studying these events.

So far, dozens of countries and several international organizations and institutions have recognized the 1915 killings of Armenians as a "genocide." 219