A double bombing in a Baghdad market left at least 88 Iraqis dead and 150 injured, dealing another blow to the Government’s hopes of putting an end to bloody attacks in the capital.

The deadliest attack this year occurred near Tahrir Square in a predominantly Shia area in the city centre. Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi Prime Minister, blamed “a coalition of Saddamists and terrorists” for the killings. “These terrorists... imagine this will break the will of the Iraqi people and incite strife,” he said.

The blasts, shortly after midday, were heard across Baghdad and caused devastation to the dilapidated Baab al-Sharqi market just across the River Tigris from the green zone.

Crowds gather there to buy cheap electronic goods, clothing and pilfered medicines. Officials said that the first blast was caused by a bomb placed in a car or in a bag left among the stalls. The second was a car bomb. Witnesses reported body parts strewn on the bloodstained pavements, with the casualties — dead and wounded together — heaped on to wooden carts for evacuation to nearby Kindi Hospital.

It was the second attack on the market in four days and came just days after 70 people, mainly students, were killed outside Mustansiriya University in another Shia area of Baghdad.

Both the university and market attacks are seen widely as an attempt by Sunni extremists to derail the forthcoming joint operation by US and Iraqi government troops to pacify the bloody capital.

The latest attack came as the US announced the death of two Marines in separate assaults in the insurgent stronghold of Anbar, on what was one of the bloodiest weekends for American forces in Iraq. On Saturday, 25 US troops were killed, including 12 in a Black Hawk helicopter crash, marking the third-deadliest day since the 2003 invasion.

Yesterday, some 3,200 US troops arrived in Baghdad as part of the new security plan announced by President Bush last month. The fresh troops will form part of a 21,500-strong force being deployed in an attempt to stem the sectarian violence which has ravaged the city.

The latest incident came hours after gunmen killed a woman teacher as she was on her way to work at a girls’ school in the mainly Sunni area of Khadra, in western Baghdad. Police said that the teacher’s driver was also wounded in the drive-by shooting.

Later two mortar shells struck a primary school in Dora, a notoriously dangerous neighbourhood in south Baghdad, killing a woman who was waiting to take her child home. Eight students were also wounded, police said.

Most of the US troops now beginning to arrive in Iraq are to be deployed in Baghdad, where US commanders concede that a similar offensive last summer failed because it was not seen to be evenhanded — it targeted mainly Sunni areas — and there were insufficient troops to hold neighbourhoods once they had been cleared of insurgents.

• Ayman al-Zawahri, the deputy leader of al-Qaeda, mocked President Bush’s plan to send more troops to Iraq in a video posted on the internet last night.

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