 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.In 1999 he was involved in the Dagestan War in which Khattab and Basayev sought to create an Islamic superstate out of Chechnya and Dagestan.