The House voted overwhelmingly Tuesday to commemorate the 1915 Armenian genocide in a rebuke to NATO ally Turkey, which has strongly opposed any such move for decades.

Most historians recognize what happened to the Armenians and other ethnic and religious minorities at the hands of the Ottoman Empire from 1915 to 1923 as genocide. However, Turkey has waged a lobbying and diplomatic battle for years urging the U.S. not to use that word to describe the slaughter of an estimated 1.5 million people.