The regime has fired Scud-style missiles against rebels, Nato said yesterday, as Palestinians forced to flee their Damascus camp returned after a reported deal to keep out of the Syrian conflict.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, raised the alarm over the risks of chaos in Syria, 21 months into an anti-regime revolt that monitors say has claimed tens of thousands of lives.

The army’s use of Scud-type missiles against rebel forces, according to North Atlantic Treaty Organisation chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen, was an act of desperation.

“I can confirm that we have detected the launch of Scud-type missiles; we strongly regret that act,” Rasmussen said. “I consider it an act of a desperate regime approaching collapse.”

The latest launches were detected on Thursday, a source close to Nato said.

In Damascus, Palestinian refugees streamed back into their Yarmuk camp after a reported deal to keep it out of Syria’s conflict, following fierce clashes earlier this week.

An AFP correspondent heard sporadic shooting early yesterday and a main road was blocked with rocks to keep out cars, although a van full of passengers still entered through a side street.

“We returned because we have had enough of being humiliated,” one of them said. “We lost our land (Palestine) but we don’t want to lose our homes and live in tents like our parents.”

The fighting forced about 100,000 of Yarmuk’s 150,000 to flee the camp, many taking refuge in the parks and squares of Damascus, said UNRWA, the relief agency for Palestinian refugees.

Residents were called to attend weekly Muslim prayers yesterday at the camp’s Abdel Qader al-Husseini mosque, which has been cleaned up after a regime air strike last Sunday that killed eight people.

The exception was the bombed out headquarters of the pro-regime Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which has been battling against anti-Assad rebels.

Talks began on Wednesday aimed at removing both rebel and pro-Government fighters from Yarmuk in southern Damascus.

Newspapers in neighbouring Lebanon said an agreement had been reached under the auspices of Mokhtar Lamani, the representative of UN-Arab League peace envoy Lakhdar Brahimi.

The UN’s World Food Programme, meanwhile, said it was to start providing food to 125,000 “vulnerable Palestinians and displaced Syrians” caught up in and around Yarmuk.

In flashpoints across Syria, violence raged yesterday, a day after at least 134 people were killed, among them 56 civilians, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

According to a preliminary count, at least 50 people were killed yesterday, said the Britain-based monitoring group.

Despite the violence, protesters took to the streets in several anti-regime areas, renewing calls for the fall of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, the watchdog said.

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