During the Soviet period Geliskhanov served as chief of the traffic police in Gudermes, Chechnya's second-largest city, reaching the rank of colonel.
Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union and Chechnya's declaration of independence, after Geliskhanov lost in elections to the post of mayor of Gudermes 1992, in 1993 Dzhokhar Dudayev made him Chechen minister of internal affairs and then director of the State Security Department DGB (ДГБ) later the same year.
Geliskhanov's DGB successes included the arrest the Chechen mafia boss Nikolay Suleimanov and the capture of two high-ranking officers of the Russian Federal Counterintelligence Service (FSK, at the time the main successor agency to the KGB) clandestinely deployed to Chechnya.
[6] He also accused the FSK of spending billion of dollars on terrorism, sabotage, propaganda, disinformation and other subversive actions aimed at toppling the Chechen government.
[11] According to Human Rights Watch, Ishkoy-Yurt, a village located directly across the border with Dagestan, was reportedly "marked for special retribution" by Russian troops on April 20 because it was the home of Geliskhanov, "a leading Dudayev loyalist".
[13][14] In 1995, along with Raduyev, Geliskhanov commanded an attack on a convoy of the Russian Interior Ministry,[2] and on December 14 the pair led a large-scale guerrilla raid on Gudermes, seizing much of the city for three days.