TURKEY:Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan met advisers in Istanbul last night to decide on further retaliatory measures against the US.
Earlier, Mr Erdogan recalled Nabi Sensoy, Turkey's ambassador to Washington, in protest at the 27 to 21 vote by the US House of Representatives' foreign affairs committee to recognise as "genocide" the mass killings of Armenians by Turks in 1915 and 1916.
Turkey is a key ally of the US, and the recall of a Turkish ambassador is unprecedented in the history of their bilateral relations.
Mr Sensoy's withdrawal was billed as a "temporary" measure by the Turks, but will be prolonged if the House of Representatives endorses the resolution later this month, as expected.
Mr Sensoy had held a last, futile meeting with Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the house, before the vote on Wednesday. Ms Pelosi, who favours the resolution, is expected to schedule a full congressional vote by October 18th or 19th.
"Things are likely to get much worse if the resolution is adopted by Congress," said a source close to the Turkish government.
Mr Erdogan is expected to announce retaliatory measures early next week, after the Muslim feast of Bayram and after meeting Turkish president Abdullah Gul and Turkey's top military officers. The measures are likely to include: the cancellation of his scheduled working visit to Washington, where he is due to meet US president George Bush, on November 5th; the restriction or curtailment of US flights from the Nato base at Incirlik, southern Turkey; and the signing of a gas deal with Iran.
US undersecretary of state Nicholas Burns travelled to Ankara late last month in the hope of dissuading the Turks from signing an Iranian gas deal.
Asked what more severe steps Turkey could take than those listed above, Mr Erdogan said: "it's something you don't talk about; you just do it."
The deterioration in Turkish-American relations also makes it more likely that Mr Erdogan will send troops into northern Iraq to fight separatist Kurds in the PKK, something the military has wanted to do since last spring.
Mr Bush, US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice and secretary of defence Robert Gates all appealed to the committee not to approve the resolution on the grounds that it would hurt US interests.
Mr Gates reminded congressmen that 70 per cent of US supplies for the occupation of Iraq go through Turkey. Kuwait and Jordan are complicated alternative routes.
Turkish sources believe the Democratic party majority are using the issue to hurt Mr Bush as much as to please the US Armenian lobby.
A shift in the US Jewish lobby, which previously opposed the Armenian resolution, has been crucial to its passage by the house committee. Turkish sources said seven of eight Jewish members of the committee voted for the resolution. Turkey and Israel have been allies since Turkey collaborated with Israel against the Egyptian president, Gamal Abdul Nasser, in the 1950s.
But neither Israel nor its allies in Washington have forgiven the neo-Islamist government in Ankara for having invited Khaled Meshaal, the Damascus-based leader of the Palestinian group, Hamas, to Turkey.
Reuters adds: Ankara rejects the Armenian position, backed by many western historians and some foreign parliaments, that up to 1.5 million Armenians suffered genocide at the hands of Ottoman Turks.
Turkey says many Muslim Turks died alongside Christian Armenians in interethnic conflict as the Ottoman Empire collapsed.
Armenian president Robert Kocharyan welcomed the decision by the US committee.
Turkey has no diplomatic ties with Armenia.
"The fact that Turkey has adopted a position up to now on genocide does not mean that it can bind other states to deny the historic truth as well," Mr Kocharyan told reporters in Brussels.
Anti-US sentiment has steadily risen in Turkey, partly because of what Turks regard as an unfair portrayal of their conduct during the first World War, but also because of what they say is a failure by the US and Iraq to crack down on about 3,000 Kurdish rebels based in northern Iraq.
Turkish military officials said Kurdish rebels killed 13 soldiers in fighting on Sunday in Sirnak province, which borders Iraq.