Michigan Senate Candidate El-Sayed's Sister Wrote That the FBI Raided Their Mom's Home. She Worked for a Charity Treasury Tied to bin Laden

Abdul El-Sayed, the Democrat running for Michigan's open U.S. Senate seat, likes to describe his mother simply as "a nurse in Missouri." His own sister has told a different story. In a 2016 essay, she wrote that she remembered "the FBI raiding mosques, homes—including my own—and Muslim charity organizations," the Washington Free Beacon reported Saturday.

The charity in that picture is the Islamic American Relief Agency, or IARA, where their mother, Fatten Elkomy, worked from 1999 until it was shut down in 2004. The U.S. Treasury closed it after finding that the group's worldwide network "provided direct financial support" to Osama bin Laden.

The scoop lands 10 days before the Nov. 3 election, in a race that could decide which party controls the Senate, and one day after El-Sayed told Fox News' Bret Baier to stop asking him about the Muslim Brotherhood.

What the sister wrote

Eman Abdelhadi, El-Sayed's half-sister and a University of Chicago professor, wrote the line in a June 2016 essay about a vigil for the Pulse nightclub victims, republished by Shadowproof. When the crowd cheered a promise to "do what we did after 9/11," she wrote, "I flashed back to memories of the FBI raiding mosques, homes—including my own—and Muslim charity organizations."

She filled in more in a 2024 piece for Zeteo. "When I was a teenager, my mother worked for an Islamic philanthropic organization that delivered humanitarian aid to orphans and refugees worldwide," she wrote. "It was one of at least nine Muslim philanthropic groups closed by the FBI in the early 2000s." She described watching her mother "comb through our house, our books, our CDs, our cassette tapes for anything that might be misinterpreted if our house got raided," and fielding calls from the FBI, "terrified but defiant," the Free Beacon noted.

It's not clear exactly when agents searched the family home. The Free Beacon says it was likely tied to the IARA case. The FBI and the Justice Department didn't respond to the outlet, and neither did El-Sayed's campaign, his mother or his sister.

The charity

On Oct. 13, 2004, Treasury designated IARA's global network a terrorist supporter. It said IARA grew out of Maktab al-Khidamat, the bin Laden-founded "precursor organization of al Qaida," that its offices "provided hundreds of thousands of dollars" to bin Laden in 1999, and that it backed Hamas into 2003. The order listed IARA's Columbia, Mo., office by street address. "The international offices of IARA were providing direct financial support to Usama bin Laden, al Qaida, Hamas and other terrorist groups," Treasury Secretary John Snow said.

The next day, FBI agents searched that Columbia office, where Elkomy worked, and questioned her for about three hours, according to a Columbia Daily Tribune story from the time cited by the Free Beacon.

In 2007 the Justice Department indicted IARA and five people tied to it. Prosecutors said the charity sent more than $1.4 million into Saddam-era Iraq in violation of sanctions and falsely denied that Ziyad Khaleel, whom DOJ called "a then-publicly identified associate and procurement agent of Osama bin Laden," had ever worked there. Khaleel was widely reported to have helped get the satellite phones bin Laden used to coordinate the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

The government's trial exhibit list names Elkomy 14 times, including eight wire transfers and a $24,607.34 transfer request to IARA's Iraq office, The Midwesterner first reported in August. She was never charged. In July 2016 IARA pleaded guilty to secretly funneling $1,375,000 to Iraq. Its U.S. office had only about six full-time employees, DOJ said. Think of a corner store with six workers: everybody knows where the money goes. That was the point counterterrorism expert Evan Kohlmann made about IARA's staff, the Free Beacon noted.

'Be a journalist'

El-Sayed has spent the race waving off questions about his family. At Wednesday's final debate, he asked why Republican Mike Rogers kept raising "this association with an organization I've never been a part of because of my mom who's a nurse in Missouri?" as UNGA NEWS reported. He has said he was raised by his father and stepmother. When the Free Beacon surfaced Abdelhadi's 2012 posts about their mother's "activism in the Muslim Brotherhood," he told NBC News it was "hearsay evidence from a tweet."

On Friday, Baier tried to ask about the 2012 letter El-Sayed signed urging Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood president, Mohamed Morsi, to "purge" the media and police. "Bret, Bret … no, no, no … let me just stop there," El-Sayed cut in, the New York Post reported. "Don't be Rogers' campaign. Be a journalist." Baier answered, "I am," per Fox News.

Rogers, a former FBI agent who chaired the House Intelligence Committee, told Baier the issue isn't faith. "It is not how he prays, it's how he thinks," he said, per Fox. "He has adopted the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood."

What's next

Both parties are bringing out their biggest names this weekend, with President Trump and former President Barack Obama both expected in Michigan, Fox reported. El-Sayed hasn't answered the Free Beacon's questions about the raid. Michigan voters now have one more question about his family that he hasn't addressed.