After graduation, he served for four years as a sergeant major in the Red Army's Strategic Missile Forces.
Returning to Chechnya, which had declared independence from Russia in the aftermath of the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, he took a job in the political department of the Chechen Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
On July 29, 1999, a month before the beginning of the Second Chechen War, the President of Ichkeria Aslan Maskhadov appointed Ilyas Akhmadov as Foreign Minister.
In his appeals and meetings with the representatives of UN, OSCE, PACE, European Parliament, UNHCR, U.S. Congress, the U.S. presidential administration and international NGOs, he called for observance of human rights during the conflict.
In April 2004 an Immigration Judge in Boston issued an order granting Akhmadov asylum in the United States; that ruling became effective in August 2004 following the U.S. Government's abrupt withdrawal of its notice of appeal of the Immigration Judge's decision.