ANKARA - Turkey has decided to participate in an exercise planned to take place in Armenia by NATO's Euro-Atlantic Disaster Response Coordination Center, even though Turkey and Armenia have no diplomatic relations.

A senior Turkish diplomat said on condition of anonymity that the current state of relations between Turkey and Armenia did not mean NATO member Turkey should abstain from a NATO exercise.

The drills will take place Sept. 11-17 in Armenia's central Kotayk region. They will bring together up to 1,000 participants from two dozen NATO member and partner states who will simulate a multinational response to a powerful earthquake resulting in a humanitarian and environmental disaster.

Turkey closed its border with Armenia in 1993 out of solidarity with Azerbaijan and has since made its reopening conditional on a resolution of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict that is acceptable to its closest Turkic ally. Ankara has stuck to this linkage even after signing "normalization protocols" with Yerevan to restore diplomatic ties and reopen its border last October.

There has been speculation in both countries in recent weeks that Ankara could also temporary open its border checkpoints to Armenians planning to attend the Sept. 19 Mass at the 10th-century Armenian Church of the Holy Cross, which is located on an island in a lake in Turkey's eastern province of Van.