“As soon as clashes erupted between Armenia and Azerbaijan, Iran’s diplomatic apparatus got active to mediate and soothe these tensions as the region cannot afford another conflict,” Seyed Abbas Mousavi told reporters in the northwestern city of Ardabil on Thursday.

He further called on both sides to show restraint, voicing Iran’s readiness to help bring an end to tensions between the two former Soviet republics.

The clashes broke out on the volatile Armenia-Azerbaijan border on Sunday and have continued over the past days.

At least 16 people, including four Armenian troops, 11 Azeri servicemen and one Azeri civilian, have been killed in the latest outbreak of hostilities between the two neighbors.

China has not said anything about any losses in soldiers in the hand-to-hand clash that took place in the heavily contested Galwan Valley in the western Himalayas, in which 20 Indian soldiers were killed and at least 76 injured, Reuters reported.

“If 20 were martyred on our (Indian) side, then there would have been at least double the casualties on their (China) side,” V.K. Singh, the minister for roads and transport, told TV News24 in an interview broadcast late on Saturday.

Singh, who is a former army chief, did not provide any evidence to support his statement. He said China historically never accepted any war casualties including in the 1962 conflict with India.

China’s state controlled Global Times said earlier there had been casualties on the Chinese side but did not elaborate.

Singh said the Indian side had handed over Chinese troops who had strayed into Indian Territory after the violent standoff.

India’s defense ministry spokesman Bharat Bhushan Babu refused to comment on Singh’s interview.

The nuclear-armed Asian neighbors traded accusations on Saturday that the other had violated their shared de facto border, an area that this week became the site of their deadliest clash in half a century.

Troops remain locked in a face-off at several locations along the poorly defined Line of Actual Control, despite talks between local commanders to de-escalate.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has criticized China for escalating border tensions with India.

Clash and face-offs flare on a fairly regular basis between India and Chinese government over their 3,500-kilometre (2,200-mile) border, which has never been properly demarcated, but no one has been killed in decades.

The Indian army said that there were “casualties on both sides”, but Beijing made no mention of any deaths or injuries as it swiftly laid the blame squarely on India for the incident.

“A violent face-off took place yesterday (Monday) night with casualties on both sides. The loss of lives on the Indian side includes an officer and two soldiers,” an Indian army spokesman said in a statement.

“Senior military officials of the two sides are currently meeting at the venue to defuse the situation.”

An Indian army officer based in the region told AFP that there had been no shooting and that the officer killed had been a colonel.

“There was no firing. No firearms were used. It was violent hand-to-hand scuffles,” the officer said on condition of anonymity.

Beijing on Tuesday confirmed the incident and accused India of crossing the border and “attacking Chinese personnel”.

Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said Indian troops “crossed the borderline twice… provoking and attacking Chinese personnel, resulting in a serious physical confrontation between border forces on the two sides.”

The Indian army said the incident took place in the Galwan Valley in the high-altitude Ladakh region — which is just opposite Tibet.

Thousands of troops from the two nuclear-armed neighbors have been involved in the latest face-off since May.

On May 9, several Indian and Chinese soldiers were injured in a clash involving fists and stone-throwing.

The Chinese foreign ministry said only last week that a “positive consensus” on resolving the latest border issue was achieved following “effective communication” through diplomatic and military channels.

In a later statement, India’s foreign ministry had said the two sides would “continue the military and diplomatic engagements to resolve the situation and to ensure peace and tranquility in the border areas.”

But sources and Indian news reports suggested that India appeared to have effectively ceded to China areas that the People’s Liberation Army occupied in recent weeks, notably parts of the northern side of the Pangong Tso Lake and some of the strategically important Galway river valley.

India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese leader Xi Jinping have sought to ease tensions at summits over the past two years when they agreed to boost border communications between their militaries.