“President Obama and his Administration, as have past administrations, have repeatedly mourned and acknowledged that 1.5 million Armenians were massacred or marched to their deaths in the final days of the Ottoman Empire,” Spokesperson for the US Department of State Mark Toner told a daily briefing.

“We also called for a full and frank acknowledgement of the facts of what happened around those deaths. And that remains our policy. I don’t want to get into terminology or how we referred to it. We acknowledged that 1.5 million Armenians were massacred, as I said, and we want to see a full historical accounting of those events,” the Spokesman said.

The comments come after UN Ambassador at an event honoring the Nobel Prize laureate Elie Wiesel’s life and work.