By David Bailey
MINNEAPOLIS (Reuters) - U.S. authorities have charged six men from Minnesota with planning to join Islamic State and fight for the militant group in Syria, the U.S. attorney for Minnesota said on Monday.
All six Somali Minnesotans are friends and had been conspiring for the past 10 months, many trying multiple times to leave the country, U.S. prosecutors alleged.
They were arrested as part of a yearlong FBI investigation into mainly young men from the area trying to travel to Syria to join Islamic State, according to prosecutors. There is no evidence they had plans to conduct an attack inside the United States, prosecutors said.
Zacharia Yusuf Abdurahman, 19, Adnan Farah, 19, Hanad Mustafe Musse, 19, and Guled Ali Omar, 20, were arrested in Minneapolis on Sunday. Abdirahman Yasin Daud, 21, and Mohamed Abdihamid Farah, 21, were arrested on Sunday in California after driving from Minneapolis to San Diego.
"We have a terror recruiting problem in Minnesota," U.S. Attorney for Minnesota Andrew Luger told a news conference.
Dozens of people from the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, many of them young Somali-American men, have traveled or attempted to travel overseas to support Islamic State or al Shabaab, a militant group based in Somalia, since 2007, according to U.S. prosecutors.
They have said the Islamic State began recruiting in the Somali community in Minnesota in 2013.
Another Minnesota man, Hamza Ahmed, was stopped in New York last November en route to Syria and indicted in February on charges of conspiring to support Islamic State and lying to federal agents investigating recruitment by militant groups.
Three of the men arrested on Sunday had traveled to New York with Ahmed, prosecutors said.
One member of the group, which met regularly to plan the trips, had doubts, changed his mind and recorded their meetings, Luger said.
"They are not confused young men, they were not easily influenced," Luger said. "These were focused men who were intent on joining a terrorist organization by any means possible."
They received advice and encouragement from another group member, Abdi Nur, who joined the Islamic State and remained in contact with them, prosecutors said. Nur was charged in November.
The six men arrested in Minnesota are due to appear in U.S. District Court in St. Paul on Monday afternoon. The men arrested in San Diego are expected to appear in court on Monday and be returned to Minnesota.
(Additional reporting by Lindsay Dunsmuir; Editing by Susan Heavey, Bill Trott and Ted Botha)