Washington, D.C. – This afternoon, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce (R-CA) joined KNX 1070 Newsradio’s Chris Sedens and Linda Nunez to respond to the horrific terrorist attacks in Brussels. Audio and key excerpts below:

On the enduring threat posed by ISIS:

“Scotland Yard, as well as continental European police forces, are overwhelmed by the sheer number of foreign fighters. They’ve shared that with us. And they’re overwhelmed by the new technologies that make these jihadists harder to track, and that’s a major problem for them.”

On stopping foreign fighters from reaching the United States:

“There’s no question that we need to be bolstering our defenses. That’s why I supported legislation, which is now law, that ends visa-waiver travel for those who’ve traveled to terror hotspots and it strengthens our ability to detect fraud in stolen passports…[Stopping ISIS] necessitates not only better training, but better border security and a long-term strategy to defeat and destroy ISIS so that those who are recruited understand that’s a dead end.”

On the need to defeat and destroy ISIS:

“We’ve got to give our pilots and our commanders already on the ground the flexibility they need. We’ve got 180,000 Kurdish forces that are on a 650-mile front with ISIS and they’re fighting with 40-year-old weapons. We’ve got to get them the mortars, the artillery, the anti-tank weapons to win that fight.  Unfortunately, the White House still doesn’t have a plan to get the job done.”

Audio is available HERE.

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