Members of the Minneapolis Somali community on May 12 waiting to enter the US courthouse in Minneapolis. A federal judge there ordered four Minnesota men accused of trying to travel to Syria to join the Islamic State group held pending trial. AP Photo/Jim Mone The US Department of Justice on Wednesday announced that a man from Minneapolis pleaded guilty to charges related to the Islamic State militant group.

But the man, whom prosecutors identified as 19-year-old Hanad Musse, was hardly the only Twin Cities resident to face charges in recent months over suspected support of the extremist group.

There have been a string of ISIS-related arrests over roughly the past year.

Why Minneapolis? Authorities say it's linked to Minneapolis-St. Paul's large Somali community.

According to The New York Times, estimates peg the local Somali population, which Minneapolis says is the largest in the US, at roughly 30,000 people.

Reports have described violent extremism as bubbling up within the local Somali community over the past few years, especially as a result of the 2006 conflict between Ethiopia and Somalia. At the time, much of the terrorism-recruitment issue centered on al-Shabab, the Somali-based group that would later become an Al Qaeda affiliate.

The office of Minnesota's US attorney, Andrew Luger, said Wednesday that groups "like the Islamic State" had since exclusively targeted the local Somali community.

"Since Al Shabaab began recruiting Minnesota's youth in 2006, the Twin Cities have been a focus of overseas terror recruiting by organizations like the Islamic State for Iraq and the Levant (ISIL)," Luger's office said in a press release. "This cycle of terror recruiting has exclusively targeted Minnesota's Somali community."

Indeed, Musse was one of six men from the region who faced charges in April accusing them of maintaining ties to ISIS. At the time, Luger directly said Minnesota had a "problem" with terror recruiting, which he described as decentralized and widespread.

"To be clear: We have a terror-recruiting problem in Minnesota. And this case demonstrates how difficult it is to put an end to recruiting here," he said at a news conference hosted by the Minnesota US attorney's office. "Parents and loved ones should know that there is not one master recruiter organizing in the Somali community locally. What this case shows is that the person radicalizing your son, your brother, your friend, may not be a stranger. It may be their best friend right here in town."

And the federal government announced in February that it had indicted another 19-year-old, Hamza Naj Ahmed, on charges accusing him of trying to support the Islamic State. After Ahmed was detained, the Justice Department said Ahmed was "at least the fourth person from the Twin Cities charged as a result of an ongoing investigation into individuals who have traveled or are attempting to travel to Syria in order to join a foreign terrorist organization."

Youths before the start of a 2013 solidarity rally by the Minneapolis Somali community to denounce al-Shabab's attack of a shopping mall in Nairobi. REUTERS/Eric Miller

Local officials are trying to turn around their problem with terrorist recruitment.

In September of last year, Eric Holder, then the US attorney general, announced a pilot program "in cities across the country to bring together community representatives, public safety officials, and religious leaders to counter violent extremism."

Minneapolis and St. Paul were among the cities that participated, according to the Minnesota US attorney's office, and their "Building Community Resilience Plan" to build bridges to the local Somali community was unveiled in February of this year.

"Since 2013, a large number of Somali Minnesotans have traveled, attempted to travel, or taken steps in preparation to travel to join ISIL," the plan said. "The Somali Minnesotan community wants this cycle of recruitment to stop and have partnered with the US Attorney's office to built a plan to stop this cycle."

The wide-ranging proposal included outreach to Somali youth; after-school and mentorship programs; community engagement by local police officers; increasing the number of Somali officers; and jobs and education programs.

"What my community, the Somali-American community, needs today is no less than a 'Marshall Plan' tailor-made to the community's employment challenges," Minneapolis City Council member Abdi Warsame, who was born in Somalia, said when the plan was presented at the White House.

The success of that plan was touted on Wednesday, about the same time of Musse's guilty plea.

"Minneapolis' Somali community is a tremendous asset to our city," Mayor Betsy Hodges said in a statement touting the pilot program's one-year benchmark. "We must all support this community and their ability to contribute to our prosperity, or we will not be the city we need to be.

"The extent to which some people in the community are turning to violence as a perceived solution to problems is the extent to which we must provide actual solutions to real problems that people are facing," she added. "The steps we are taking today build on our work to strengthen the Somali community."

Correction (2:04 p.m.): This story initially said a news conference was hosted by the FBI instead of the US attorney's office in Minnesota.