His father, Anwar Hadid, studied at a Jerusalem teachers' college and attended a university[which?] in Syria to study law, before working in land settlement for the British authorities and teaching English at a teachers' college in Mandatory Palestine. In 1948, he moved to Syria and joined the United States Information Agency and the Voice of America. He and his family lived in Damascus, Tunisia, and Greece before moving to Washington, D.C., as Anwar had a job at the VOA headquarters there, when Mohamed was 14, and spent the rest of his career there with VOA and USIA as a writer, editor and translator.[1][2][14]