Fast facts
- Division: Lightweight
- Record: 12-0 (7-0 on the Russian regional circuit, one Contender Series win, 4-0 in the UFC)
- Nationality: Tajik, born in Dushanbe on December 8, 2000
- Team/gym: Not listed in available records
- Notable wins: Josh Wick (TKO, Round 1, Dana White’s Contender Series), Rafael Alves, Joe Solecki, Shaqueme Rock, Mike Davis
Before anybody in a suit was paying him to fight, Nurullo Aliev was doing it for free in the schoolyards of Dushanbe. He was the fourth of six kids, the restless one, and by his own family’s account that energy kept landing him in trouble because he couldn’t stop scrapping with classmates. At 12, somebody had the good sense to point all of that at a wrestling mat. He started training alongside his brothers, and the fights moved from the hallway to somewhere with rules.
That detail about the brothers is the one I keep coming back to. Plenty of fighters have the troubled-kid origin, but fewer start the sport as one of a pack, learning positions against people who know exactly how to annoy you and won’t let you quit early because you’ll hear about it at dinner. You don’t need a biography to guess what a houseful of wrestling siblings does to a kid’s tolerance for discomfort.
The quiet climb
Aliev turned pro in 2018 and spent the next three years on the Russian regional circuit, going 7-0 before anyone in the American fight press had a reason to type his name. No hype video, no viral clip. Seven fights, seven wins, and then a phone call.
The call was to Dana White’s Contender Series. On September 20, 2022, in Week 9 of Season 6, he met Josh Wick and stopped him by TKO in the first round. He got the contract, and with it a line in the record books that nobody can take from him: he became the first fighter from Tajikistan to compete in the UFC. He was 21.
I’m wary of the way the sport loves to anoint a guy after one good night in Las Vegas, and Aliev’s career since has been a pretty good argument for patience over noise.
A debut with an asterisk, and a long silence
His UFC debut came on February 25, 2023, at UFC Fight Night 220 against Rafael Alves, and it was messy in a way that probably still follows him around. Aliev had a point taken for a bite, which is about as rare and as ugly a foul as you’ll find in this sport. He won anyway, by majority decision, which tells you how far ahead he was on the cards before the deduction.
Then the momentum stalled. He was booked against Mateusz Rębecki at UFC 295 on November 11, 2023, and pulled out in early November with an injury. Roosevelt Roberts took the spot. Aliev wouldn’t fight again until January 2025, close to two full years after his debut, which is an eternity for a young prospect on a fresh contract. Careers have gone cold over less.
When he did come back, the plan fell apart again before fight night. Yanal Ashmouz withdrew from their UFC Fight Night 249 matchup on January 11, 2025, for reasons that were never made public, and Joe Solecki stepped in. Aliev beat him by unanimous decision. After two years away and an opponent swap, a clean decision win was about the best possible outcome.
Learning to win the long way
What stands out about his UFC run is that the Wick stoppage is the outlier. Every one of his four UFC wins has gone to the judges. He took a unanimous decision over Shaqueme Rock at UFC Fight Night 265 on November 22, 2025, and another over Mike Davis at UFC Fight Night 282 on July 25, 2026.
The Davis fight deserves a closer look because of who Davis is. He’s been in the UFC for six years, a veteran who has never quite broken through, and the loss to Aliev left him 1-2 in his last three, as the matches-to-make columns at Yahoo Sports and MMA Mania pointed out after UFC Edmonton last weekend. Both outlets floated Davis as a measuring stick for Cristian Perez, the debutant who knocked out Kyle Nelson in 27 seconds in Edmonton. That’s the role Davis played for Aliev three months earlier: the gatekeeper you have to get past before anyone takes you seriously. Aliev got past him over three rounds.
Stylistically, the wrestling base is the whole story. He’s a grappler, and that’s how his next opponent sees him too. Grant Dawson, talking to Cageside Press on the Top Turtle podcast this week, spoke about the opportunity to face a grappler again and what Aliev brings to the table. A fighter who wins decision after decision and hasn’t lost is usually a fighter who’s very hard to put in bad positions, and that’s exactly what he’ll be asked to prove on Saturday.
The hardest test on paper
Dawson is a problem for anyone, and a specific kind of problem for a wrestler. He’s 24-3-1, and he owns the UFC lightweight record for highest control time percentage at 69.7%, along with the second-highest top-position percentage at 62.3%, according to MMA Fighting. Read those numbers again. For most of his UFC career, when Dawson is in a fight, he’s on top of somebody.
He’s also coming in sharp. Dawson choked out Mateusz Rębecki at UFC 328 in May, the same Rębecki that Aliev was supposed to fight back in 2023 before the injury. That win got Dawson back on track after Manuel Torres knocked him out at UFC 323. Somewhere in the middle of his camp, Dawson also found time to sit down with José Youngs on MMA Fighting’s Anything But Fighting and keep up his crusade against Batman’s no-killing rule, which is the kind of loose, unbothered energy you see from a guy who likes his matchup.
This is the fight that tells us what Aliev’s 12-0 actually means. Wick, Alves, Solecki, Rock and Davis are real wins, and I’m not interested in sneering at them. But none of those men had the résumé or the ground numbers Dawson brings. If the scrambles go Aliev’s way, if he can keep a control specialist from settling on top for long stretches, he walks out of Abu Dhabi with the best win of his career and a much louder name. If Dawson does what Dawson usually does, we find out where the ceiling is for now.
I think the matchmakers did right by him. A 25-year-old who has spent most of his UFC tenure fighting replacements and veterans needed a name, and they gave him one who will test the exact skill set he’s built his life on, starting in those wrestling rooms with his brothers.
Aliev and Dawson meet on the preliminary card of UFC 333 at Etihad Arena in Abu Dhabi on Saturday, October 24, on a night headlined by Alexander Volkanovski defending the featherweight title against Movsar Evloev, with Petr Yan and Merab Dvalishvili settling their trilogy for bantamweight gold in the co-main.
