Four Armenian soldiers were killed in an attack by Azeri forces on Friday near the breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh region, in a new outburst of violence in the region, Nagorno-Karabakh’s Defense Ministry said. Clashes along the border between Armenia and Azerbaijan and around Nagorno-Karabakh, which lies inside Azerbaijan but is controlled by majority ethnic Armenians, have stoked fears of a wider conflict breaking out in the South Caucasus, through which oil and gas pipelines cross. Sporadic clashes between the two have thwarted international efforts to end the dispute, which broke out in the dying years of the Soviet Union and has killed about 30,000. The separatist region’s Defense Ministry said in a statement that four Armenian soldiers had died and several were wounded as a result of artillery shelling and gunfire from the Azeri forces. Azeri officials were not immediately available to comment.