 In 1919, her father Mohammed Selim al-Radi was one of the first Iraqis to be educated in the United States when he studied agriculture in Texas.He married Suad Abbas, became an Iraqi diplomat and was appointed ambassador to Iran in 1947 and then to India from 1949 to 1958, where Nuha al-Radi grew up.She was educated at private English-speaking schools in Delhi and Simla, except for a brief spell in 1956 when she attended a boarding school in Alexandria to improve her Arabic, but this was interrupted by the Suez Crisis.