"I understand that my colleagues are war weary. I'm war weary. I understand the American people are war weary," Rep. Eliot Engel of New York said on Tuesday.
"But I think doing nothing would invite something very similar that happened to my city, New York City, on that fateful day of Sept. 11, 2001," he added.
The top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee also warned that the threat of an attack extended beyond his country.
"If we do nothing, ISIS (or ISIL) will plot and plan and we'll have many more 9/11s in the United States, in Europe, in the Middle East," Engel said.
The United States and its allies have been supporting extremist groups in Syria to fight the government of President Bashar al-Assad.
ISIL exploited the chaos of the Syrian conflict to capture large swaths of territory there, before sweeping into neighboring Iraq where the militants have been rampaging through villages and towns, carrying out massacres and expelling hundreds of thousands of residents.
Last month, President Barack Obama ordered the Pentagon to launch airstrikes against ISIL targets inside Iraq.
During a speech last week, Obama said his administration would not hesitate to take action against the group in Syria.
In an interview with Press TV, former CIA contractor Steven Kelley said that ISIL is a completely fabricated enemy created and funded by the United States.
“The funding is completely from the United States and its allies and for people to think that this enemy is something that needs to be attacked in Syria or Iraq is a farce because obviously this is something that we create it, we control and only now it has become inconvenient for us to attack this group as a legitimate enemy,” Kelley said.
Source: PressTV