Khalilov came to the attention of the authorities in 1998 when he married the sister of the foreign mujahideen commander Ibn al-Khattab's ethnic Dargin wife; he moved to her home village of Karamakhi, which acquired notoriety in the summer of the same year, when its residents introduced Sharia law and declared an Islamic state.

Khalilov grew close to local Islamist ideologists and is thought to have met Khattab and Shamil Basayev at a militant training camp in Serzhen-Yurt, south-eastern Chechnya.

[2] Khalilov first became well known after the January 18, 2002, bombing of a Russian military truck, which killed seven Interior Ministry soldiers in the capital of Dagestan, Makhachkala.

This was confirmed when in a September 2006 decree, Doku Umarov, the successor to Abdul-Halim Sadulayev named Khalilov as a brigadier general and made him as the commander of the Dagestan front.

[8] RPO-A flamethrowers were used by the commandos to destroy the house, but the shooting only ceased at dawn of the next day, when the residence was crushed to the ground by an army tank and seven armoured personnel carriers.