Abdul El-Sayed’s mother came under scrutiny from Republican Mike Rogers during Michigan's U.S. Senate debate this week, as polls show a close race in the battleground state. The race is expected to be among the most competitive of the November midterms.
El-Sayed, a Democrat, and Rogers faced off during a debate on Thursday in hopes of winning over any remaining undecided voters in what could be one of the handful of races to decide which party controls the Senate in the next Congress. One of the viral clips from the debate centered around a line of attack from Rogers about El-Sayed’s mother, Fatten Elkomy, who allegedly worked at the Islamic American Relief Agency, a branch of the Islamic African Relief Agency. During the debate, Rogers brought up reports about the former employer of El-Sayed’s mother.
El-Sayed asked: “You’re going after my mom?” while Rogers said he was “going after” the organization for which she worked. I’ll put my mom up any day for that,” he said. El-Sayed said Rogers wanted the debate to be “about anything but his own record.” “He wants to make this about anybody else, going after my mom or my sister," he said.
"Got nothing to actually say about me. I’m a dad and a doctor.” Rogers’ remarks referred to a report from conservative news outlet The Midwesterner that El-Sayed’s mother worked for the Islamic American Relief Agency from 1999 to 2004. In 2004, the Treasury Department announced that it designated the Islamic African Relief Agency as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT), finding that it provided assistance to Taliban fighters.
Elkomy was never charged with any crime or accused of any wrongdoing. She denied that the organization had any connections in 2004 remarks to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported by The Midwesterner.
Several Islamic American Relief Agency officials were later convicted for the organization’s financial transactions with Iraq in violations of sanctions, and the organization was dissolved as part of its deal with prosecutors, according to a July 2016 release from the Justice Department. Charges of terrorism were never brought against the organization, according to Snopes. El-Sayed spokesperson Roxie Richner told Snopes that Elkomy was “working to help orphaned children” and was never named as a defendant in the court cases related to the organization.
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