On its public platforms, the Human Development Fund (HDF) presents itself as an international humanitarian charity dedicated to “breaking the cycle of poverty.” Targeting primarily Muslim-American donors, it promotes a portfolio of humanitarian programs, including emergency food, clean water and sanitation infrastructure, orphan sponsorships, and medical relief. It operates in 27 countries, with a particular focus on Gaza.
While the organization, founded in 2023, does not traffic in explicit anti-Israel propaganda, Omar Suleiman, founder of the Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research, who has declared that the “Zionist project is entirely built on Palestinian extermination,” serves as a prominent booster of HDF’s work.
Because of support from people like Suleiman and other prominent Muslim intellectuals, such as Altaf Hussein who served two terms as president of the Muslim Student Association, an organization founded by the Muslim Brotherhood, HDF has experienced extraordinary growth since its founding. Its revenue surged from $1.1 million in 2023 to more than $33 million innull2024, an increase of nearly 3,000 percent. This increase in donations is particularly troubling given its connections to Islamist leaders in the United States, questions about its financial operations, and its network of grant recipients, both domestic and overseas.
Zionist project is entirely built on Palestinian extermination.
HDF’s public support comes largely from figures like Suleiman, but its leadership also reaches into the world of federal contracting. Mohamed Hussein, listed on HDF’s executive board, is the founder and CEO of Piedmont Global Language Solutions, a Virginia-based firm that provides translation and cultural consulting services to the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, and federal intelligence agencies.
HDF’s Ties to Dar Al-Farooq Islamic Center
HDF leaders have close ties to Dar Al-Farooq Islamic Center in Bloomington, Minnesota, which served as a meal-distribution site under the federal Child Nutrition Program during the Feeding Our Future fraud scheme. That scheme led to the conviction of dozens of defendants for conspiring to steal roughly $250 million intended to provide free meals to children from low-income families. Operators connected to the site claimed high daily meal volumes that prosecutors later described as inflated.
One HDF official with ties to Dar Al Farooq is Abdirahman Aden Kariye, former country director for Helping Hand for Relief and Developmentnull(HHRD), another Muslim non-profit which has drawn scrutiny over alleged partnerships involving Falah-e-Insaniat Foundation (FIF), a U.S.-designated Lashkar-e-Taiba front, prompting aUSAIDnullInspector General inquiry. Kariye, who currently serves HDF’s chairman, and CEO, also serves as an imam at Dar Al-Farooq.
Kariye testified as a defense witness in the 2024 trial of Mukhtar Mohamed Shariff, a longtime mosque member and convicted defendant who oversaw aspects of the food operation there. In his testimony, Kariye, a longtime friend of Shariff’s, stated that he observed food distribution at the mosque after becoming imam in mid-2021 and believed the reported volumes were plausible. Prosecutors characterized aspects of the testimony as inaccurate; other witnesses described more limited distribution (primarily on Saturdays).
Khalid Omar, HDF’s Director of National Events and Operations, also served as a director at Dar Al-Farooq. In 2021, while the fraud was ongoing, Omar emceed an award ceremony that honored Aimee Bock, later convicted as a central figure in the scheme, and publicly praised her as a strong community leader and the Feeding Our Future program.
Omar is also a senior organizer with ISAIAH and works with Faith in Minnesota, both 501(c)(4) advocacy networks focused on political mobilization, including campaigns against federal immigration enforcement. During the early 2026 federal immigration enforcement crackdown known as Operation Metro Surge, these networks spearheaded large-scale public demonstrations, culminating in a major day of action on January 23, 2026. On that day, ISAIAH and Faith in Minnesota organized a public protest at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, where dozens of activists and clergy members were arrested on civil disobedience and trespassing charges.
HDF’s Grant Recipients
According to HDF’s 2024 IRS filings, which state the organization’s headquarters is located in Michigan, $16,092,667 of its revenue was direct contributions, approximately 50 percent. The other half, $16,286,025, consisted of “non-cash contributions” of pharmaceuticals and medical supplies, which, based on the dollar amount, appeared to remain undistributed at the close of the 2024 fiscal year.
With half of its revenue reported to be undistributed by the end of 2024, how the other half was spent reveals the aggressive machinery driving the operation. HDF, which did not respond to inquiries from Focus on Western Islamism, spent significantly more on advertising ($3.13 million) than the $2.69 million it gave to grantees in Africa, Asia and the Middle East in 2024.
In 2024, HDF reported spending $3,132,170 on “Advertising and promotion,” roughly 27 percent of its entire expense budget, despite publicly advertising that only 9 percent of contributions are used for marketing and operational costs.
In a possible attempt to keep its advertising bill from triggering red flags on charity watchdog sites such as Charity Navigator, which penalize organizations with unusually high fundraising overhead, HDF appears to use an accounting method known as joint-cost allocation. By reporting that its fundraising advertisements also served an “educational” or “programmatic” purpose, HDF’s filings allocated a joint-cost bill between Program Services and Fundraising Expenses with an exact 50/50 mathematical split—with exactly $1,566,085 reported in each category.
Financial disclosures also show that millions of dollars have been given to a network of U.S.-based nonprofits linked to the organization’s leadership. These main grant recipient organizations share overlapping management and governance with HDF itself, creating a system in which funds were transferred among closely related entities within the U.S. rather than being traceable to humanitarian projects.
The Miftaah Institute in Warren, Michigan, received $722,000 from HDF. While the grant recipient is named as “International Islamic Faith” in the IRS filing, the provided tax ID corresponds directly to Miftaah’s official EIN: 85-0828075. Miftaah is also listed alongside HDF as a partner organization of Dar Al-Farooq, and its scholars participate in HDF fundraisers. The Miftaah Institute serves as an ideological incubator for radical Islamism in the West by providing platforms to hardline figures like Shaykh Yasir Qadhi and Omar Suleiman. Through strategic alliances with organizations like the Qalam Institute, Miftaah mainstreamizes transnational Islamist agendas for American audiences.
HDF also granted $250,510 to the Al Jazari Institute, another organization connected to the Dar Al-Farooq. The Al Jazari Institute is not merely an independent recipient; it is the parent non-profit organization and core seminary program under which the Dar Al-Farooq Center directly operates. By funneling a quarter-million dollars into the Al Jazari Institute, HDF became the institution’s largest donor.
Another grant of $52,000 was given to the Qalam Foundation, whose leadership overlaps with HDF’s ShariahnullGuidance Board through the Texas-based Qalam Institute, in particular through Shaykh AbdulNasir Jangda, the Founder and President of Qalam.
Qalam is the most important and influential Deobandi organization in the United States, serving as a primary training seminary embedding hardline imams, educators, and community leaders into mosques nationwide. This includes core leaders like Abdul Nasir Jangda and Hussain Kamani, who have justified violent traditionalist punishments, sex slavery, and sanctioned the killing of adulterers. Kamani branded Western secular society as “filth.” Declaring, “We are surrounded by filth … our environment is full of this filth, everywhere we turn.”
In total, more than $1 million was directed to a connected network of organizations linked to HDF’s executives.
While the domestic cash trail, the international cash trail offers total anonymity. HDF left the foreign recipients’ names completely blank, instead clumping the funds into generalized geographic blocks. HDF reports that it gave just over $2 million to undisclosed recipients in the Middle East and North Africa, $558,000 to unnamed recipients in other parts of Africa, and just under $50,000 to unnamed recipients in South Asia.
HDF filings state zero offices, employees, and agents outside the U.S., indicating that HDF operates entirely as an invisible pass-through funder organization. The reported absence of international personnel on federal filings stands in contradiction with its marketing material. On its Gaza Relief portal, HDF states that it maintains an on-the-ground workforce of “over 90 team members” inside Gaza managing mobile medical caravans, hot-meal kitchens, and schools approved by Hamas’ Ministry of Education. HDF also claims that transporting physical aid through border crossings into Gaza can be “severely constrained by security restrictions.” As a result, HDF states that it relies on “purchasing available supplies from local wholesalers” already inside Gaza.
HDF’s leadership is clearly alert to the scrutiny that follows Muslim charities through the financial system. In a 2024 post on its Facebook page, HDF announced that CEO Abdirahman Kariye had hosted Irshad Rasheed, president of the Islamic Banking Division at Stearns Bank N.A., at the organization’s Minneapolis office to “explore collaboration opportunities.” The stated rationale was the value of “strong relationships with banks, especially for Muslim-based charities and organizations often facing debanking challenges.”
The upshot is this: HDF, a charity which raised $33 million in its second year of operation, spent more on advertising than it granted overseas, routed more than $1 million to organizations run by its own leadership, and reported millions more to foreign recipients it declined to name — while telling donors it employs ninety people in a territory where its federal filings show it has none. An organization that grew this fast on the strength of its donors’ trust owes them, and the regulators who granted its tax exemption, a fuller accounting than its tax filings have provided.