A United States counterterrorism operation carried out in Nigeria resulted in the death of 199 jihadists and the largest seizure of enemy electronic equipment recovered by US forces since the September 11, 2001 attacks, according to a senior White House official.
Sebastian Gorka, Deputy Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Counterterrorism at the National Security Council, disclosed the details during an interview with Marissa Streit, CEO of the US media organization PragerU.
Gorka said the operation, conducted roughly three weeks before the interview, resulted in what he described as the largest enemy neutralization in one counterterrorism operation since 9/11.
“I can talk about this because it has been declassified,” Gorka said. “The president is not nation-building; he’s not going around the world like some lunatic neocon saying, ‘we will turn the world into America.’ But if you’re threatening Americans, or if you’re targeting Christians, because they are Christians, he has a very strong message to send to you, whether it was his Christmas Day strike, or three weeks ago, what we did in Nigeria.”
Describing the operation in vivid terms, Gorka said he watched it unfold from the White House Situation Room.
“Three weeks ago in Nigeria, and I watched it live from the Situation Room. It was like being in a Tom Clancy movie, but it’s better because it’s real. I watched our operatives kill 199 jihadists in one operation,” he said.
He framed the scale of the kill count against the post-9/11 record. “Now, why is this important? That is the biggest neutralization enemy killed in action since September the 11th — 199 jihadists who will not harm Americans again.”
Beyond the death toll, Gorka said the raid produced an unprecedented intelligence windfall, requiring an extra aircraft to transport seized devices out of Nigeria. “Not only that, from that raid we brought home, we needed an extra plane to bring home all the electronic material that we captured in those camps. And the haul was three times bigger than any enemy electronics haul since 9-11,” he said.
“And that is priceless, because now our experts are taking apart all of that information, looking at how ISIS is communicating with each other. We are so back in the game of counterterrorism. It is just superlative to watch our professionals.”
Gorka added that the Trump administration has killed more than 1,000 jihadists globally, and explained why Africa has become a focal point of US counterterrorism strategy.
“Terrorists need ungoverned space. They need somewhere where they can hang out and rebuild. Africa has a lot of ungoverned space. That’s why I focus a lot of my attention on that region of the world where ISIS is trying to reconstitute a caliphate,” he said.
The raid was conducted in collaboration with the Nigerian government, part of an expanding security partnership between Abuja and Washington that has intensified since December 2025.
That cooperation has centred on intelligence-sharing, joint counterterrorism strategy and military capacity building, and follows a series of high-level exchanges, including a November 2025 Washington meeting led by National Security Adviser Nuhu Ribadu that produced agreement to establish a Nigeria-US Joint Working Group on security.
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