272 Jihadis Killed: The Trump Admin’s Counterterrorism Strategy

Since Jan. 20, the Trump administration has killed 272 “jihadis” around the world, according to Sebastian Gorka, senior director for counterterrorism on the president’s National Security Council.

Among the first terrorist threats eliminated under President Donald Trump was a leading member and recruiter for ISIS. 

“This [was] a man planning to kill Americans,” Gorka explained during a discussion of “Trump’s New Counterterrorism Strategy Landscape” at The Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., on Thursday afternoon.  

Trump had been sworn in for a second time just over a week before when Gorka, the national security adviser, and other members of Trump’s national security team walked into the Oval Office “with a map of that region with a satellite photograph of the individual,” Gorka recounted. He and the other officials told Trump that members of the national security community had been watching this “key ISIS jihadi,” who was then in Somalia, for 18 months.

“The president looked up from the Resolute Desk,” Gorka recalled, “and said to us, ‘What do you mean, ‘We’ve been watching him for a year and a half’? Kill him.’” 

Less than 30 hours later, Gorka said, he was in the Situation Room of the White House and “like a Tom Clancy movie—but better, because it’s real—at exactly 8:45 a.m. … that piece of human filth was turned into red mist. That was Day 11.”  

The story depicts what Gorka describes as Trump’s counterterrorism strategy.

September 2026 will mark 25 years since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack on the U.S., and Gorka says the Trump administration is aiming to “finish the job” the U.S. began after that attack. 

“It is my intent, through various means, over a very short duration, to apply the ultimate tools of counterterrorism to so demoralize [and] decapitate … the most dangerous terrorist groups in the world that I will be put out of business,” Gorka said.  

The biggest terrorist threats to the U.S., he told The Daily Signal, are undeniably those with the capabilities for carrying out another 9/11-style attack on U.S. soil, and the terrorists currently residing in the U.S. who crossed the border illegally during four years of the Biden administration. Iran is the final great terrorist threat to America because of “the proxies [Tehran funds] to the tune of literally billions of dollars, including Hamas and Hezbollah, and also the technology and the training they provide those proxies.”  

But it is not enough to eliminate the terrorist threats, Gorka says, adding that he is working at the direction of the president to target the “center of gravity of the jihadi global movement, which is its ideology.” 

“I propose a very aggressive counter-ideology campaign working especially with our Muslim allies, with the Emiratis, the Jordanians, the Moroccans, to divest groups like Hamas, al-Qaeda, ISIS, [and] Al Nusra of the thing that allows them to recruit: a credible ideology,” Gorka said. “My intent is to make them look [like] what they are: a bunch of hypocritical losers.”  

Additionally, Gorka says, the Trump administration’s counterterrorism strategy includes abandoning so-called forever wars and nation-building.  

“There’s only one nation President Donald Trump is interested in building: it’s this nation, it’s America,” he said.  

Finally, the senior director for counterterrorism says he is making it his mission to strip politics from counterterrorism strategy.  

Referring to the Biden administration’s use of resources to investigate, and even prosecute, American citizens who surged the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, or traditional Catholics, Gorka says he is willing to “die on the hill of getting politics out of counterterrorism.”  

“We’re never going to defeat terrorism, because it will always be with us at some level,” Gorka said, “but suppressing it to a level where it’s not a strategic threat anymore … I think that could be the greatest legacy for the president in the counterterrorism domain.”  

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