BERLIN (Sputnik) — Earlier this year, Berlin prolonged until the end of 2017 the deployment of six Tornado jets and hundreds of German personnel to Turkey’s Incirlik airbase despite strained relations between the two countries. The jets are used to collect intelligence on Daesh militants in Syria and Iraq.
"It is not clear yet whether it will be necessary to pull out German armed forces from Incirlik," a spokesperson for the Defense Ministry told the Bild newspaper.
German-Turkish relations deteriorated after the German parliament’s decision in June to label the 1915 massacre of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire as genocide. Following this decision, Ankara restricted a delegation of German lawmakers' access to the air base. Nonetheless, in October, Turkey allowed the delegation to visit the German servicemen at the base.