Baghdad ? America’s new ambassador to Iraq expressed horror Tuesday at the violence wracking the country and said Islamic extremists and Saddam Hussein loyalists are trying to start a civil war.

U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, who arrived from Afghanistan, said militants are using Iraqis as “cannon fodder” in a quest to dominate the Islamic world.

“I will work with Iraqis and others to break the back of the insurgency,” Khalilzad promised on a day that saw more than a dozen gunmen launch an assault on a Baghdad police station, wounding two policemen.

A roadside bomb also killed a U.S. soldier on patrol in western Iraq, officials said, while a mortar attack killed a woman and a child in their home in Tal Afar, 95 miles east of the Syrian border.

“I am horrified by the daily suffering of the Iraqi people. The terrorists attack ordinary people, teachers, doctors, newly trained police and others who are assisting the people of Iraq,” Khalilzad added.

His comments followed a series of attacks by suicide bombers in Baghdad and northern Iraq on Sunday and Monday that killed dozens of people – many of them police. At least one of the attacks was claimed by Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi’s al-Qaida in Iraq.

“Foreign terrorists and hard-line Baathists want Iraq to descend into civil war. Foreign terrorists are using the Iraqi people as cannon fodder,” said Khalilzad, who previously served as U.S. ambassador to his native Afghanistan. He succeeds John Negroponte, now the national intelligence director.

Al-Zarqawi last month purportedly gave his stamp of approval to the killing of fellow Muslims and civilians collaborating with Iraq’s Shiite-led government and the United States. He also has said his aim was to start a civil war between the minority Sunni Arabs and the Shiite majority.

The number of attacks blamed on Islamic extremists has escalated since Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari announced his Shiite-led government on April 28. Nearly 1,200 people have been killed since then, according to an Associated Press count based on military, police and hospital reports.

Lt. Gen. John R. Vines, commander of the Multinational Corps in Iraq, said Tuesday a group of non-Iraqis led by the Jordanian-born al-Zarqawi was behind many of the spectacular bombings on civilian targets.

Iraqis stand on top of the rubble of a destroyed home in Karabila Tuesday at the end of the U.S. forces' four-day Operation Spear in the area along the Syrian border. Iraqis, who had fled the region during the U.S.-led assault, returned to sift through the damage and bury the dead.

On Tuesday, al-Qaida in Iraq said it has formed a unit of potential suicide attackers who are exclusively Iraqis, an apparent bid to deflect criticism that most suicide bombers in Iraq are foreigners.

The terror organization announced the unit in an Internet posting signed by Abu Maysara al-Iraqi, its purported spokesman. The statement could not be authenticated, but it appeared on an Islamic Web site known for carrying messages from militant groups.

The U.S. military has said foreign fighters make up only about 5 percent of the insurgents fighting the U.S. presence in Iraq. They do a disproportionate amount of killing, however, in part because they are more likely to carry out suicide bombings.

U.S. and other analysts say the foreign fighters are primarily Islamic militants waging what they regard as jihad or holy war, while the much larger homegrown, mostly Sunni Arab, insurgency has tended to be motivated more by political grievance and factional rivalry.

Some militants have begun threatening fellow Sunni Arabs because some of the minority’s leaders have expressed a readiness to join the political process.

“Hard-line Baathists who commit crimes against the Iraqi people are working to foster an all-out civil war in the hope of either restoring dictatorship and their control of Iraq, or taking the country down with them. They will fail,” Khalilzad said after meeting with President Jalal Talabani.