Turkey’s most senior general warned on Sunday that military ties with the US would be severely damaged if the House of Representatives adopted a resolution labelling the massacre of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire as genocide. The warning comes amid signs that relations between Washington and Ankara are starting to unravel.

General Yashar Buyukanit told Milliyet newspaper that the US had “shot itself in the foot” in its handling of the Armenian resolution, adopted by a House committee last week, and by failing to clamp down on the PKK Kurdish separatist movement in northern Iraq, which Turkey blames for the killings of at least 30 Turkish soldiers and civilians in the past two weeks.