US officials tried to limit the damage to relations with Ankara yesterday after the Turkish Government condemned the Obama Administration’s failure to prevent a vote labelling the murder of 1.5 million Armenians as genocide.

The Turkish Ambassador to Washington arrived back in Ankara after being recalled in protest over the vote, as while theWhite House issued a strong warning to Congress to drop its effort to force the US to change its official position on the 1915 killings.

“Any further congressional action is an impediment to ongoing efforts to normalise relations between Turkey and Armenia,” a senior administration official told The Times. “We have a broad and strategic relationship with Turkey and continue to support its efforts to improve relations with Armenia.”

A regional backlash against Thursday’s vote was already brewing in Azerbaijan, where President Aliyev joined Turkey to condemn what a spokesman called “a unilateral decision... accepted under pressure from pro-Armenian congressmen”.

The spokesman repeated Azerbaijan’s demand that Turkey and Armenia shelve their efforts at diplomatic rapprochement until Armenia has resolved its dispute with Baku over the mainly-Christian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. Though within Azerbaijan's borders, the enclave has been administered by Armenia since a war in the early 1990s that left nearly 30,000 people dead.

The Turkish Ambassador to Washington arrived back in Ankara after being recalled in protest over the vote and Ahmet Davutoglu, the Turkish Foreign Minister, summoned the US Ambassador to Ankara for talks.

He said that the White House could have prevented the vote, which calls on President Obama to refer to the massacres as genocide in his annual speech to Armenians in the US.

“If an adviser had whispered ‘No’ instead of ‘Yes’ in the ear of a member of the House of Representatives, the vote would have been different,” Mr Davutoglu said.

The House Committee on Foreign Affairs approved the resolution by 23 votes to 22. Nancy Pelosi, the House Speaker, can refuse to call a vote by the full chamber, but has shown sympathy for the Armenian position in the past.