Nigeria was among 11 countries that participated in an INTERPOL counter-terrorism operation that used artificial intelligence and facial recognition technology to identify 126 suspected Foreign Terrorist Fighters linked to jihadist groups.
Known as Operation Shams II, the five-day operation was coordinated by the International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL) from June 1 to 5, 2026, in Tunis, Tunisia.
The operation brought together 28 specialised law enforcement officers and experts from Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Iraq, Kenya, Malaysia, Nigeria, the Philippines, Qatar, Tajikistan, Tunisia and Uzbekistan.
According to INTERPOL, officers extracted 108,076 facial images from visual content published online by jihadist groups during the operation.
Programmed artificial intelligence agents and advanced AI-generated scripts were used to automate parts of the data collection and investigative process, including removing duplicate images and checking the quality of the material.
The process reduced the dataset to 6,362 unique, high-quality facial images for processing through INTERPOL’s Facial Recognition System.
INTERPOL said the artificial intelligence-generated results were not accepted without human review. Trained officers and analysts examined and verified the results in accordance with the organisation’s Rules on the Processing of Data.
The operation has so far led to the identification of 126 Foreign Terrorist Fighters from the images processed.
INTERPOL said the matches would strengthen existing intelligence on the suspects, including information that could help establish their potential locations and social networks.
The data is being integrated into INTERPOL’s databases to support efforts by law enforcement agencies to detect, track and disrupt terrorist movements across borders.
Investigative leads generated during the operation are already being used to support judicial proceedings in participating countries, including a case involving two suspected Foreign Terrorist Fighters who are currently detained.
INTERPOL said thousands of additional images are still awaiting processing, meaning further comparisons could produce additional investigative leads and identifications.
The operation also targeted terrorist financing, with investigators using cryptocurrency tracing tools to track suspected illicit financial flows.
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 networks.
The participating countries also engaged representatives of the online gaming industry to discuss the risk of youth radicalisation in online environments.
INTERPOL said the engagement was intended to strengthen cooperation between law enforcement agencies and the private sector and improve information sharing on emerging threats.
The operation also benefited from a large intelligence dataset supplied by officers from INTERPOL’s National Central Bureau in Baghdad, Iraq. The material contained hundreds of additional images linked to terrorism suspects for extraction and processing.
INTERPOL’s Director of Counter-Terrorism, María Carmen Muñoz González, said Operation Shams II demonstrated the value of combining international law enforcement cooperation with responsible artificial intelligence-assisted analysis.
The operation was conducted under the Counter-Terrorism Technology (CT TECH+) Project, funded by the European Union’s Foreign Policy Instruments and supported by the United Nations Office of Counter-Terrorism.
INTERPOL said the use of artificial intelligence helped investigators process large volumes of digital material while maintaining human verification of the results.
The organisation said the ongoing analysis of the remaining images could generate further intelligence and investigative leads against suspected terrorist networks.
