The half-sister of Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed wrote in 2016 that federal agents searched the home she shared with her mother, the Washington Free Beacon reported Saturday.
University of Chicago professor Eman Abdelhadi made the remarks in an article about a vigil in New York for the victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting. She recalled FBI raids on mosques, Muslim charities and homes – “including my own house”. The article did not say when the search took place.
Their mother, Fatten Elkomy, worked at the Islamic American Relief Agency (IARA) in Missouri from 1999 to at least 2004, according to court records previously reported by The Daily Telegraph. Federal agents raided the charity’s offices in October 2004, and that same month the Treasury Department designated its global network a sponsor of terrorism for providing financial support to Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda and Hamas.
Elkomy was never charged. Evidence in the government’s subsequent prosecution mentioned her multiple times, including for her role in wire transfers and requests to send more than $24,000 to the charity’s Iraq office. The charity’s executive director and a board member later admitted to illegally transferring funds to Iraq in violation of U.S. sanctions, and IARA itself admitted in 2016 to transferring approximately $1.4 million to Iraq.
In another article published in 2024, Abdulhadi wrote that as a teenager she watched her mother sort through the family’s belongings, looking for anything that might have been misread during raids, and that her mother regularly fielded calls from the FBI.
Days earlier, El-Sayed said during Wednesday’s final debate with Republican Mike Rogers that the attack stemmed from his mother being “a nurse in Missouri.” Rogers pressed El-Said about the IARA employment and Abdelhadi’s 2012 social media posts describing his mother’s activism in the Muslim Brotherhood as a college student in Egypt in the 1970s.
El-Sayed denies that he or his family have any ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, telling NBC News that he has never discussed the topic with his mother. He said his parents divorced when he was three and he was raised by his father and stepmother. His campaign has previously said Elkomi’s work with charities involves helping orphans.
El-Sayed’s campaign did not immediately respond to The Daily Telegraph’s request for comment.