Obama urges allies to step up ISIS fight: ‘We all have a role to play’

by Jordan Fabian - 04/01/16 4:41 PM ET

President Obama: "We all have a role to play" to defeat ISIS https://t.co/6OZtrfIwim https://t.co/f01VbKHFv7

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President Obama on Friday pleaded with countries around the world to improve intelligence sharing in order to better fight the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

“This is a threat to us all,” Obama told world leaders during the closing session of the Nuclear Security Summit in Washington.

{mosads}Obama said the U.S. would be sending additional “surge teams” to Europe soon to help countries prevent fighters from joining ISIS and opening lines of communication about impending threats.

“We all have a role to play,” he added. “We’re all going to have to do more when it comes to intelligence sharing. We simply cannot afford to have critical intelligence not being shared as needed, whether between governments or within governments.”

The government leaders are meeting amid increasing fears about ISIS’s reach in the West. The group carried out deadly attacks in Paris and Brussels over the past six months.

Belgian security officials have come under criticism in the aftermath of both attacks because suspects in both came from a Brussels neighborhood known to be a hotbed of Islamic extremism.

Law enforcement officials in Belgium was apparently aware of the suspects in the Paris attacks a month before they occurred but failed to foil the plot amid internal disputes.

The threat posed by ISIS has hung over the nuclear summit.

Leaders discussed ways to ensure that nuclear material doesn’t fall into the hands of ISIS and other extremist groups.

Obama met one-on-one with French President François Hollande to talk about the ISIS fight, and the Friday afternoon session of the summit was dedicated to discussing the campaign.

“There is no doubt that if these madmen ever got their hands on a nuclear bomb or nuclear material, they most certainly would use it to kill as many innocent people as possible,” the president said earlier Friday.

Two of the suspects in the Brussels attacks were reportedly monitoring a Belgian nuclear scientist, prompting concerns about ISIS’s desire to obtain nuclear material or attack a facility.

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