ST. PAUL— When Guled Ali Omar made up his mind to join the Islamic State group, he wasn’t easily deterred.

The Minnesota man emptied his bank accounts last May and planned to fly to Syria via San Diego, federal officials say, but his family confronted him and he set his plans aside. In November, he tried to board a flight in Minneapolis, but was stopped by the FBI.

Even while under investigation, Omar and five other men kept trying to make their way to Syria, coming up with a plot to secure false passports.

Omar is among six Minnesota men of Somali descent charged with terrorism-related offenses in a criminal complaint unsealed Monday. They are among the latest Westerners accused of traveling or attempting to travel to Syria to join the Islamic State group, which has carried out a host of attacks including beheading Americans.

In Alabama on Monday, a spokesman for Muslim couple said their 20-year-old daughter fled a Birmingham suburb to join IS militants in Syria after being recruited online. The woman’s whereabouts weren’t immediately clear.

Authorities described the Minnesota men as friends in the state’s Somali community who recruited and inspired each other and met secretly to plan their travels. They are charged with conspiracy to provide material support and attempting to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization.

“What is remarkable about this case is that nothing stopped these defendants from pursuing their goal,” U.S. Attorney for Minnesota Andy Luger said Monday. “They never stopped plotting another way to get to Syria to join ISIL,” using an alternative acronym for the militant group.

The Minneapolis area is home to the largest concentration of Somali immigrants in the U.S. Since 2007, more than 22 young Somali men have also traveled from Minnesota to Somalia to join the militant group al-Shabab, which is also listed by the U.S. State Department as fomenting terrorism. Al-Shabab gunmen carried out an attack on a university in Kenya on April 2 that left 148 people dead, most of them university students.

Authorities have said a handful of Minnesota residents have traveled to Syria to fight with militants in the past year, and at least one has died.

The Minnesota men charged on Monday were identified as Omar, 20; brothers Mohamed Abdihamid Farah, 21, and Adnan Abdihamid Farah, 19; Abdurahman Yasin Daud, 21; Zacharia Yusuf Abdurahman, 19; and Hanad Mustafe Musse, 19.

All six are of Somali descent. Daud is a permanent resident, and Guled is a naturalized citizen. The others were born in the U.S.

Luger said that in this case, there was no “master recruiter” in Minnesota’s Somali community, but rather this group of family and friends engaged in “peer-to-peer” recruiting. They also helped each other with funding — taking money out of their own accounts or, in one case, trying to sell a car.