RismadarVoice Reporters
September 18, 2026
An international counter-terrorism operation involving Nigeria and 10 other countries has identified 126 suspected foreign terrorist fighters from more than 108,000 facial images extracted from jihadist material online.
The operation, codenamed Operation Shams II, was coordinated by the International Criminal Police Organisation, INTERPOL, and held in Tunis, Tunisia, from June 1 to 5, 2026.
According to INTERPOL, 28 specialised officers and experts from Nigeria, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Iraq, Kenya, Malaysia, the Philippines, Qatar, Tajikistan, Tunisia and Uzbekistan participated in the operation.
The exercise focused on disrupting terrorist networks and their financing through digital investigations.
During the five-day operation, law enforcement officers extracted 108,076 facial images from visual material published by jihadist groups.
INTERPOL said artificial intelligence tools and AI-generated scripts were used to automate parts of the investigative process, including removing duplicate images and assessing image quality.
The technology reduced the material to 6,362 unique, high-quality facial images, which were subsequently analysed using INTERPOL’s facial recognition system.
The organisation stressed that AI-generated matches were not treated as final findings without human verification. Trained officers and analysts reviewed the results in accordance with INTERPOL’s rules on data processing.
Additional intelligence provided by INTERPOL’s National Central Bureau in Baghdad, Iraq, included hundreds of images associated with terrorism suspects.
“To date, 126 Foreign Terrorist Fighters have been identified from the images processed during Operation Shams II,” INTERPOL said.
The organisation said the matches would strengthen existing intelligence on the suspects, including information about their possible locations and social networks.
The information is being incorporated into INTERPOL databases to assist law enforcement agencies in detecting, tracking and disrupting the cross-border movement of terrorist suspects.
INTERPOL added that investigative leads generated during the operation were already supporting judicial proceedings in participating countries, including a case involving two suspected foreign terrorist fighters currently in detention.
Thousands of additional images are still awaiting processing and could produce further investigative leads, the organisation said.
The operation also targeted terrorist financing, with investigators using cryptocurrency-tracing tools to follow suspected illicit financial transactions.
According to INTERPOL, the financial investigation resulted in three urgent requests to a virtual asset service provider for customer information as authorities sought to disrupt suspected terrorist financing channels.
Participants also held discussions with representatives of the online gaming industry over concerns that digital gaming environments could be exploited for youth radicalisation.
INTERPOL Director of Counter-Terrorism, María Carmen Muñoz González, said the operation demonstrated the potential of combining international police cooperation with responsible AI-assisted analysis.
She said the approach could serve as a model for future international operations targeting organised criminal and terrorist networks.
Operation Shams II was conducted under the CT TECH+ Project, funded by the European Union’s Foreign Policy Instruments and supported by the United Nations Office of Counter-Terrorism.
INTERPOL described the operation as the first of its kind to deploy AI-assisted capabilities on such a large scale to process terrorist-related visual content and generate investigative leads.
