A female university professor has become the latest victim in a string of murders of intellectuals in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul.

The professor of law was assassinated in front of her home in the al-Intissar district of western Mosul by unknown gunmen on Tuesday, the local police said. They declined to give her name.

The US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 unleashed a vicious cycle of violence, and in the first three years of Iraq's occupation, more than 200 academics were killed and hundreds went missing or were driven into exile, a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) report said.

Last month, Ahmed Murad Shehab, a professor of Mosul University's Faculty of Administration and Economics, was fatally shot in the predominantly Sunni neighborhood of al-Nur, on Mosul's left bank.

Many others have stopped teaching and researching in order to protect themselves and their families since the US occupation forces have proven unable or unwilling to protect them.

However, as violence dropped sharply across the war-torn country, the number of scholars assassinated decreased as well.

Meanwhile, five US troops were killed on Friday in the deadliest attack on US forces in Iraq for more than a year when a suicide truck bomber struck a police compound in Mosul.

FTP/AAM/HGL