FBI raided home of El-Sayed’s mother, Senate candidate’s sister wrote in unearthed article

The Department of Justice charged IARA’s U.S. branch, where El-Sayed’s mother worked, with illegally transferring funds to Iraq in 2007.

By Alana Goodman, The Washington Free Beacon

The FBI raided the home of the left-wing Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed’s mother in the early 2000s, likely in connection with a terror financing case that shut down the Islamic charity she worked for, according to El-Sayed’s sister, Eman Abdelhadi.

Abdelhadi, a University of Chicago professor and the daughter of El-Sayed’s Egyptian-born mother, Fatten Elkomy, referenced the raid in a June 2016 article detailing her experience at a New York City vigil for the Pulse nightclub shooting.

Elkomy took issue with a line from one of the vigil’s speakers, then-New York governor Andrew Cuomo, who promised to “do what we did after 9/11” and “build back a monument better than ever before.”

“I flashed back to memories of the FBI raiding mosques and homes—including my own—and Muslim charity organizations,” Abdelhadi wrote.

“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 did not elaborate on the raid in the article. She did, however, further detail her experiences with the FBI in an August 2024 piece in Zeteo headlined, “I Tweeted Chicago Protesters Were ‘Ready’ for Harris. Then, I Got the Call From the FBI.”

“As a Muslim, I am no stranger to FBI surveillance,” Abdelhadi wrote.

“When I was a teenager, my mother worked for an Islamic philanthropic organization that delivered 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.”

“Between work, school, and mothering was the FBI,” she continued.

“I remember watching her comb through our house, our books, our CDs, and our cassette tapes for anything that might be misinterpreted if our house got raided,” Abdelhadi wrote of her mother, who is also El-Sayed’s mother.

“She fielded calls from the FBI every once in a while. I can picture her face after those calls, terrified but defiant. We learned to whisper even in our homes, to be careful what we said over the telephone.”

Abdelhadi was describing the Islamic American Relief Agency (IARA), where her mother, Elkomy, worked from 1999 through at least 2004, when the nonprofit was shut down after the Treasury Department designated its “worldwide network” for funding terrorism, including the precursor organization of al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and Hamas.

The FBI raided the IARA’s Columbia, Mo., office, where Elkomy worked, on Oct. 14, 2004, according to a Columbia Daily Tribune article, which notes that “federal agents interviewed Elkomy, 44, for about three hours yesterday. ‘ All the conversation was trying to find how we do work and how I do work,'” Abdelhadi told the paper.

It’s unclear exactly when the FBI raided Elkomy’s home, but the raid was likely in connection with the investigation into IARA. The FBI and the Department of Justice did not respond to a request for comment.

The Department of Justice charged IARA’s U.S. branch with illegally transferring funds to Iraq in 2007, and search warrants related to the case remain under seal.

Exhibits filed as part of the case name Elkomy 14 times and document her participation in eight wire transfers, including a $24,607.34 transfer to the IARA’s Iraq office.

They also refer to phone calls she made asking for money for IARA’s Iraq operations, court records first reported by the Midwesterner show.

Elkomy was not charged with a crime, though she was listed as a witness the federal government would likely subpoena during trial to testify on her “work at IARA.”

Two of IARA’s board members and the organization itself pleaded guilty in the case, so no trial ever occurred.

Abdelhadi’s writings on her mother’s run-ins with the FBI stand in stark contrast to El-Sayed’s descriptions of Elkomy.

The candidate has faced scrutiny from Republican opponent Mike Rogers not just for his mother’s connections to the IARA but also for her “activism in the Muslim Brotherhood during the early 70s when she was in college,” as Abdelhadi put it in a June 2012 tweet.

“He keeps raising this question about this association with an organization I’ve never been a part of because of my mom, who’s a nurse in Missouri,” El-Sayed said during the course of the candidates’ final debate on Wednesday.

Abdelhadi, who attended Alexandria University’s school of medicine in Egypt, still lives in Missouri, where she works for The Islamic School of Columbia.

While she denied any knowledge of the IARA’s wrongdoing in her 2012 post-raid interview, “the charity was so small that all of its employees most likely knew about its activities,” counterterrorism consultant Evan Kohlmann, an expert witness in the IARA case, told the New York Times.

“It was no secret that they were doing this,” he said, referring to the group’s financial support for Osama bin Laden.

One of IARA’s employees, for example, procured a satellite phone for bin Laden while on a business trip paid for by the IARA in 1997.

The phone was used by bin Laden to organize terrorist attacks on U.S. embassies, according to the Department of Justice.

El-Sayed’s campaign, Elkomy, and Abdelhadi did not respond to requests for comment.

El-Sayed’s family has not steered clear of the FBI since the IARA raid.

In her 2024 Zeteo article, Abdelhadi said she was questioned by the bureau after sending threatening tweets referencing then-vice president Kamala Harris ahead of her visit to Chicago for the 2024 Democratic National Convention. “Oh, Kamala is NOT ready for Chicago,” Abdelhadi wrote.

“But don’t worry; we’re ready for her.”

“On Friday morning, I got a voicemail from the FBI. When my phone rang and Apple registered it as the ‘US Government,’ I knew exactly who it would be,” Abdelhadi wrote.

“For the past week, Kamala Harris supporters have been bombarding my social media pages with proud declarations that they’d reported me to the federal government as well as my employer for ‘threatening the Vice President.’ ”

Abdelhadi indicated that Harris’s supporters were Islamophobic, writing, “My post would not have been considered threatening if I were not Muslim or Palestinian.”

(Elkomy married Abdelhadi’s father, a Palestinian man, after she and El-Sayed’s father, who was also born in Egypt, divorced.)

One year later, in March 2025, Abdelhadi wrote in reference to her involvement in anti-Israel demonstrations at the University of Chicago, “Wanna call the FBI? I already have a file, baby. Trouble at the border? I and everyone in my family has already gotten additional screenings … for decades.”

El-Sayed has distanced himself from Abdelhadi on the campaign trail. In a recent interview with Tom Llamas of NBC News, he dismissed Abdelhadi’s tweets about their Muslim Brotherhood family members as “hearsay.”

The posts were revealed in a Washington Free Beacon report shortly after El-Sayed told Meet the Press that neither he nor his family members have ties to the Brotherhood.

“I have never had these conversations with my mother,” said El-Sayed. “Like, you’re using hearsay evidence from a tweet. This is not serious.”

But El-Sayed and Abdelhadi appear to have a relationship. In 2020, he sent money to Abdelhadi on Venmo for their mother’s birthday gift.

Years earlier, he served as guardian for Abdelhadi at her 2016 wedding, which was conducted under Sharia law and which featured Elkomy, the Free Beacon reported.

Elkomy, for her part, has lauded El-Sayed’s candidacy.

“The feeling when you think you’ve accomplished a lot but then your older brother runs for senate!!!” she wrote in an April 2025 tweet.

“In all seriousness—Abdul is fighting for healthcare, housing, and an economy that serves people over oligarchs. I am a proud little sister.”

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