The International Criminal Police Organisation (INTERPOL) has identified 126 suspected foreign terrorist fighters from more than 108,000 facial images extracted from jihadist content online during an international counter-terrorism operation involving Nigeria and 10 other countries.
The operation, codenamed “Operation Shams II”, was held in Tunis, Tunisia, from June 1 to 5, 2026, and brought together 28 specialised officers and experts from participating countries.
According to INTERPOL in a statement published on Friday, the operation involved Nigeria, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Iraq, Kenya, Malaysia, the Philippines, Qatar, Tajikistan, Tunisia and Uzbekistan.
The organisation said the operation focused on disrupting terrorist networks and their financing through digital intelligence and cross-border police cooperation.
During the exercise, officers extracted 108,076 facial images from visual content published by jihadist groups. Artificial intelligence tools and scripts were then used to remove duplicate images and improve the quality of the data.
The process reduced the dataset to 6,362 unique, high-quality facial images, which were subsequently analysed using INTERPOL’s facial recognition system.
INTERPOL said all AI-generated results were reviewed and verified by trained officers and analysts in accordance with its data-processing rules.
“To date, 126 Foreign Terrorist Fighters have been identified from the images processed during Operation Shams II,” the organisation said.
It added that the matches would strengthen existing intelligence on the suspects, including information about their potential locations and social networks.
The data is being integrated into INTERPOL databases to support efforts to identify, track and disrupt the cross-border movement of terrorist suspects.
INTERPOL said 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.
The organisation said thousands of additional images remained to be processed and could produce further investigative leads.
The operation also targeted terrorist financing, with cryptocurrency-tracing tools used to follow suspected illicit funds. INTERPOL said the financial investigation resulted in three urgent requests to a virtual asset service provider for customer information.
The participating countries also engaged representatives of the online gaming industry over concerns about the radicalisation of young people through digital platforms.
INTERPOL Director of Counter-Terrorism, María Carmen Muñoz González, said the operation demonstrated the potential of combining international law enforcement cooperation with responsible AI-assisted analysis.
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 scale to analyse terrorist-related visual content and generate investigative leads.
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