ANKARA (Reuters) – Turkish President Abdullah Gul will visit Armenia at the weekend for a soccer match, the president’s office said yesterday, in a major diplomatic step for the two states which have no diplomatic ties.

Turkey severed diplomatic relations with Armenia in protest against Yerevan’s control of the Nagorno-Karabakh region over which Armenia fought Turkey’s ally Azerbaijan in a war in the 1990s.

Armenia and Turkey will play against each other in the Armenian capital Yerevan on September 6 in a qualifying match for the 2010 FIFA World Cup.

“We believe that this match will be instrumental in removing the barriers blocking the rapprochement between the two peoples with common history and prepare a new ground,” a statement on the president’s official website said.

“We hope that this will be an opportunity for the two peoples to understand each other better,” it said.

Turkey and Armenia are at odds over the question whether ethnic Armenians killed by Ottoman Turks during World War I were victims of genocide.

Armenia wants Turkey to recognize what it calls the systematic genocide of Armenians during World War I. Yerevan says that 1.5 million ethnic Armenians died at the hands of Ottoman Turks.

Turkey strongly denies the accusations and says that both Christian Armenians and Muslim Turks died in the fighting.

Armenian President Serzh Sarksyan invited Gul to watch the football match and called for closer ties with Turkey.

The tiny ex-Soviet republic of Armenia is sandwiched between Turkey and Azerbaijan in a region that is emerging as an important transit route for oil exports from the Caspian Sea to the world markets.