The FBI raided the home of Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed’s mother in the early 2000s, according to writings by his sister, Eman Abdelhadi. The raid was likely connected to a terror financing investigation involving the Islamic charity where their mother worked.
Abdelhadi, a University of Chicago professor, described [1] the raid in a June 2016 article about attending a New York City vigil for the Pulse nightclub shooting. Their mother, Fatten Elkomy, was born in Egypt.
At the vigil, New York governor at the time Andrew Cuomo promised to “do what we did after 9/11” and “build back a monument better than ever before.” Abdelhadi said the remarks brought back stark memories.
“I flashed back to memories of the FBI raiding mosques, homes—including my own—and Muslim charity organizations,” Abdelhadi wrote. She added, “If the crowd remembered how the state had imprisoned thousands of Muslims after 9/11, it certainly did not show it or did not care.”
Abdelhadi offered more details about her family’s dealings with the bureau in an August 2024 Zeteo article. She wrote that her mother worked for an Islamic philanthropic organization that provided humanitarian aid to orphans and refugees worldwide.
“It was one of at least nine muslim philanthropic groups closed by the FBI in the early 2000s,” Abdelhadi wrote. She recalled her mother searching their books, CDs and cassette tapes for anything agents might misinterpret during a raid.
The organization was the Islamic American Relief Agency, known as IARA. Elkomy worked there from 1999 through at least 2004, when the nonprofit was shut down after the Treasury Department designated its “worldwide network” for funding terrorism.
The designation included funding for the precursor organization of al-Qaeda, the Taliban and Hamas. On Oct. 14, 2004, the FBI raided IARA’s office in Columbia, Missouri, where Elkomy worked, according to a Columbia Daily Tribune article.
[2]Federal agents interviewed Elkomy, who was 44, for about three hours. The precise date of the raid on her home remains unclear, though it was likely connected to the investigation into IARA.
The Department of Justice charged IARA’s United States branch in 2007 with illegally transferring money to Iraq. Search warrants associated with the case remain under seal.
Court exhibits name Elkomy 14 times and document her participation in eight wire transfers, including a $24,607.34 transfer to IARA’s Iraq office. The records also refer to telephone calls in which she sought money for IARA’s operations in Iraq.
Elkomy was not charged with a crime. She was listed as a witness whom federal prosecutors would likely subpoena to testify about her work at IARA, but no trial occurred because two board members and the organization pleaded guilty.
Counterterrorism consultant Evan Kohlmann, an expert witness in the case, told the New York Times that the charity was so small that its employees most likely knew about its activities. “It was no secret that they were doing this,” he said, referring to financial support for Osama bin Laden.
One IARA employee procured a satellite phone for bin Laden during a business trip funded by IARA in 1997. According to the Department of Justice, bin Laden used the phone to organize terrorist attacks on United States embassies.
Republican opponent Mike Rogers has scrutinized El-Sayed over his mother’s IARA connection and Abdelhadi’s claim that Elkomy participated in “activism in the Muslim Brotherhood during the early 70s when she was in college.” El-Sayed has rejected the relevance and reliability of his sister’s claims.
During the candidates’ final debate, El-Sayed asked why Rogers kept raising an association with an organization he had never joined because his mother was a nurse in Missouri. In an NBC News interview, he dismissed Abdelhadi’s social media posts about family connections to the Muslim Brotherhood as “hearsay.”
Abdelhadi separately wrote that the FBI questioned her after she posted about Kamala Harris before the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. “Oh Kamala is NOT ready for Chicago,” she wrote. “But don’t worry; we’re ready for her.”
In March 2025, Abdelhadi referenced her involvement in demonstrations opposing Israel at the University of Chicago and wrote that she already had an FBI file.
Despite El-Sayed’s effort to distance himself politically from Abdelhadi, the siblings appear to have maintained a relationship. He sent her money through Venmo for their mother’s birthday gift in 2020 and served as her guardian at her 2016 wedding conducted under Sharia law.