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BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Five Iraqi civilians and two police officers have been killed by bombings near the Iraqi town of Baquba and in Baghdad, officials say.

In the town of Khalis a bomb exploded outside the Iraqi Islamic Party's headquarters, an official with Diyala province's Joint Coordination Center has told CNN.

The explosion occurred Saturday at about 9:35 a.m. outside the headquarters in Khalis, about 20 miles (32 km) northwest of Baquba, the official said. Two people were also injured.

The Iraqi Islamic Party has been the target of regular attacks in volatile Diyala province.

And in the center of the capital the two Iraqi police officers died when a bomb targeted their police patrol, emergency police said. Another police officer and four civilians were wounded in the attack at about 9:30 a.m.

An hour earlier, a bomb detonated near Interior Ministry police commandos, wounding four, police said. The incident occurred in southern Baghdad.

Saturday's violence followed on from attacks on Friday when six people, including a child, were killed and dozens more wounded in separate incidents in Baghdad, police said.

A bomb in a parked car and a mortar round both exploded in a busy commercial stretch of al-Kifah Street in central Baghdad, killing five, police said.

Earlier, a mortar round landed on a house in southern Baghdad, killing the child, and two roadside bombs wounded four Iraqi security personnel, police said.

The same day, the commander of Task Force Baghdad said U.S.-led forces have made strides in fending off insurgents in the capital.

In a teleconference from Baghdad with reporters at the Pentagon, Maj. Gen. William Webster Jr. said the insurgency has weakened since the parliamentary elections of December 15, but the violence that has been steadily claiming the lives of U.S. troops will likely persist.

Soldier killed

A Task Force Baghdad soldier was killed in a mortar attack on Saturday in southern Baghdad, the U.S. military said.

The soldier died from wounds suffered in the attack on a U.S. patrol.

A total of 2,178 U.S. military personnel have now been killed in Iraq since the beginning of the war.

Other developments

The families of the Christian humanitarian workers taken hostage in Iraq last month appealed to captors on Friday to free the men. The message, including a phone number and e-mail address, was posted on the British Foreign Office Web site. The appeal came a day after video surfaced on a Web site showing five Sudanese hostages, including a diplomat. (Full story)

South Korea's parliament voted Friday to reduce its troop deployment in Iraq and extend its presence in the northern Iraqi province of Erbil for another year. The contingent, the third-largest after the U.S. and British, will be cut from 3,200 to 2,300.

Iraq's government is trying to persuade oil tanker drivers to return to work after they walked off the job because they had received death threats from insurgents, an oil ministry spokesman said Thursday. (Full story)

U.S. troops killed two terrorism suspects and seized weapons near Dawr in Salaheddin province, U.S. forces based in Tikrit said Friday. Troops from the 1st Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division, thwarted a drive-by attack Wednesday, killing the attackers. They also found a cache of bombs, mortar rounds, assault rifles and other munitions, the military said.

Iraqi and U.S. forces detained 109 "suspected terrorists and seized four weapons caches in northern Iraq" in a series of actions dating from December 17 to Thursday, U.S. forces based in Mosul said Friday. Most of the incidents occurred in Tal Afar and Mosul, in Nineveh province.

CNN's Arwa Damon, Mohammed Tawfeeq and Sohn Jie-ae contributed to this report.

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