126 terrorism suspects were identified in an online operation targeting terrorist networks. During Operation Shams, 28 specialized officers and experts from 11 countries — Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Iraq, Kenya, Malaysia, Nigeria, Philippines, Qatar, Tajikistan, Tunisia, and Uzbekistan — extracted 108,076 facial images from visual content published by a jihadist group. INTERPOL coordinated Operation Shams II from 1 to 5 June 2026. Over five days of coordinated action in Tunis, Tunisia, law enforcement officers extracted the material from different sources. Programmed AI agents and an advanced AI-generated script were used to automate parts of the data collection and investigative process, enabling the system to duplicate and quality-check the images.
This dataset was narrowed down to 6,362 unique, high-quality facial images ready for processing by INTERPOL’s Facial Recognition System. AI-generated output was reviewed and verified by trained officers and analysts in accordance with INTERPOL’s Rules on Processing of Data. In addition to images obtained from an online platform, officers from INTERPOL’s National Central Bureau in Baghdad, Iraq, provided a large intelligence dataset related to terrorism suspects, adding hundreds more images for extraction and processing.
To date, 126 foreign terrorist fighters have been identified from images processed during Operation Sham-II. These matches will strengthen existing intelligence on suspects, including possible locations and social networks. The data is now being integrated into INTERPOL’s databases, reinforcing global efforts to detect, track, and disrupt terrorist movements worldwide. The investigative leads identified are already being used to support judicial proceedings in participating countries, including one case involving two currently detained suspects. With thousands more images still to be processed, further comparisons are ongoing and may reveal additional leads.
Operation Sham-II also employed cutting-edge cryptocurrency tracing tools to track illicit funding. This led to three urgent requests to a virtual assets service provider for customer data, aimed at disrupting terrorist financing flows. According to Maria Carmen Munoz Gonzalez, Director of Counter Terrorism at INTERPOL, the success of Operation Shams-II demonstrates the value of combining international law enforcement cooperation with responsible AI-assisted analytical capabilities.