Abdul El-Sayed’s Mother Worked For Terror Group That Funded Bin Laden And Taliban

New court records show that the mother of Democratic Michigan Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed worked for an American-based Islamic charity later designated by the federal government as a terrorism supporter, after the organization was accused of financially supporting Osama bin Laden, the Taliban, and Hamas.

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Fatten Fathy Elkomy, El-Sayed’s birth mother, worked for the Islamic American Relief Agency (IARA), also known as the Islamic African Relief Agency, from 1999 through at least 2004, according to records first reported by the Midwesterner. The Treasury Department designated IARA a global terrorist organization in October 2004.

The Treasury Department accused IARA’s international offices of providing “direct financial support” to bin Laden, al-Qaeda, and other terrorist organizations. 

The Treasury designation said IARA had been affiliated with Maktab al-Khidamat, an organization co-founded and financed by bin Laden that was a precursor to al-Qaeda. According to the department, IARA and bin Laden’s network had commingled funds and cooperated in fundraising and spending. An IARA program also worked with an institute controlled by bin Laden that provided assistance to Taliban fighters, Treasury said.

The department further said that information available to the U.S. government showed that overseas IARA branches provided hundreds of thousands of dollars to bin Laden in 1999.

IARA’s American operation was later separately prosecuted by the Justice Department over illegal transfers to Iraq. In 2016, IARA-USA pleaded guilty to conspiring to violate U.S. sanctions and other offenses after secretly transferring $1.375 million to Iraq.

Federal prosecutors said the organization had used its tax-exempt status to solicit donations while concealing prohibited transfers. The organization was subsequently dissolved. 

Several IARA officials and employees were also prosecuted. Executive Director Mubarak Hamed received nearly five years in prison after pleading guilty to conspiring to illegally transfer more than $1 million to Iraq, obstructing tax laws, and lying to federal agents. Another top IARA fundraiser pleaded guilty to conspiring to lobby for the organization’s removal from a government list of charities suspected of terrorist ties. 

Elkomy was not charged in the federal case or named as a co-conspirator, and the court records cited here do not establish that she knowingly supported terrorism.

In a 2004 interview with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Elkomy defended her work for IARA, saying she was helping orphans and children who had lost a parent.

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“I’ve been working there serving orphans and children with at least one deceased parent, and it breaks my heart they’re not going to get any help,” Elkomy said at the time.

Court records from the subsequent IARA prosecution nevertheless reference Elkomy multiple times. According to the Midwesterner’s review of the government’s proposed exhibit list, her name appears in 14 exhibits, including records involving eight wire transfers and five recorded telephone calls between 1999 and 2002.

One document concerned an IARA-USA request to transfer $24,607.34 to its Iraq office.

The revelation comes as El-Sayed, who narrowly won the Democratic nomination for Michigan’s open Senate seat earlier this month, campaigns to become the first Muslim elected to the U.S. Senate. He will face Republican Mike Rogers in November.

The newly uncovered records add to previously reported connections between El-Sayed’s family and organizations with documented ties to Islamist networks. His father-in-law, Tayeb Jukaku, has served on the founding committee of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) since at least 2007 and previously served as president of the Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). Jukaku has also contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to Fighting for Michigan PAC, a super PAC supporting El-Sayed. 

Both ISNA and CAIR were identified as unindicted co-conspirators in the federal Holy Land Foundation terrorism-financing case. Federal prosecutors claimed that the Holy Land Foundation funneled more than $12 million to Hamas, while a federal judge later found that the government had presented ample evidence connecting ISNA and CAIR to Hamas. 

The family connections come as El-Sayed has faced scrutiny over his own past statements concerning Islam and Sharia law. As a 24-year-old medical student in 2009, El-Sayed told The New York Times that he had chosen a Sharia-compliant mortgage because he did not want to reach the end of his life having failed to follow Islamic law.

“Ultimately, the question is, when I die and I stand before God and go through everything I did in my life, I don’t want to say I did it the easy way instead of the Sharia-compliant way,” El-Sayed said at the time.

The Daily Wire reached out to El-Sayed’s campaign for comment but did not receive a response before publication.

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