Gingrich: We’ll ‘lose a city’ if ISIS gets nuke

Former Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) said Monday that the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is relentlessly seeking nuclear weapons to attack the United States.

“We live in a world surrounded by people who want to kill us,” Gingrich told host Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business Network’s “Mornings with Maria.”

{mosads}“There is a Islamist movement which would like to impose Islam on us, either by having us convert or having us submit.”

“If they acquire a nuclear weapon, we are going to lose a city,” he added. “This is a really serious problem in the long run for the survival of our civilization.

“We had better adjust to this new reality or we are going to suffer tremendous casualties. That’s how serious this problem is.”

The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is claiming responsibility for a series of terrorist attacks in Paris last week that killed about 130 people.

Gingrich said the carnage should raise red flags about President Obama’s plan for accepting more people displaced by the Syrian civil war. At least one of the Paris attackers appears to be a man who slipped into France while posing as a refugee.

“We currently have no intelligence that allows us with any sense of comfort to be able to vet which of Syrian refugees are legitimate and which of them are purveyors of radicalism,” Gingrich said.

“Remember, it only took eight people to pull off this massacre,” he added of the Paris attacks. “That’s a pretty sobering thought for the kind of force multiplier terrorists have.

“This is a wide fight. This is not a Syrian fight. [It is about] suspending all the Syrian refugees and not allowing them into the United States until we understand what percent of them are terrorists and who’s who.”

Gingrich said radical Islam can also take root closer to home, noting there “are an estimated 47 mosques in the Paris region which teach Sharia, which suggest that jihad is legitimate to impose Sharia law.”

“You’re going to find, I think, that most of the people involved in the killing last Saturday were European citizens, not people coming from Syria,” Gingrich said.

Obama defended his plan Monday for accepting 10,000 displaced Syrian refugees into the U.S.

“The people who are fleeing Syria are the most harmed by terrorism, they are the most vulnerable to the consequences of civil war and strife,” he said during the Group of 20 summit in Antalya, Turkey.