Washington, Aug 7 - The US is no longer engaged in a 'war on terrorism'; neither is it fighting 'jihadists' nor locked in a 'global war' as the Obama administration's top homeland security and counterterrorism official has called the terms coined by the Bush administration as unacceptable.

It is now solely a 'war with Al Qaeda' and its violent extremist allies, John Brennan, who heads the White House homeland security office, said during a speech Thursday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.

The Washington Times reported Friday that the 'semantic shift' is intended to bring precision to the way the president and his aides talk about the nation's efforts to defeat Al Qaeda, though Bush administration officials point out that there is no dramatic change in the policies.

According to Brennan, to say the US is fighting 'jihadists' is wrong because it is using 'a legitimate term, 'jihad', meaning to purify oneself or to wage a holy struggle for a moral goal', which 'risks giving these murderers the religious legitimacy they desperately seek but in no way deserve.'

'Worse, it risks reinforcing the idea that the United States is somehow at war with Islam itself,' Brennan was quoted as saying.

He said the administration will not use the phrase 'war on terrorism' 'because terrorism is but a tactic - a means to an end, which in Al Qaeda's case is global domination by an Islamic caliphate.'

He also dismissed 'global war' as a term that feeds the terror network's vision of itself as a 'a highly organized, global entity capable of replacing sovereign nations with a global caliphate.