Owais Yaqoob — Fighting Out of Pulwama
Eleven days ago, the fighter billed as Jammu and Kashmir’s first professional mixed martial artist stopped an unbeaten two-time IMMAF world champion in Bulgaria. He is 6–1, a voted-in member of Team Khabib, and still waiting on a title fight. What his run does, and does not yet, mean for Indian MMA.
The referee stopped it four minutes into the first round. At BRAVE CF 107 in Burgas on 1 August, Owais Yaqoob finished Delyan Georgiev with punches in a 68 kg catchweight bout, handing the Bulgarian, who was unbeaten as a professional, a two-time IMMAF world champion as an amateur and fighting in his own country, the first professional loss of his career. Seventy-three per cent of fans polled by Tapology had picked Georgiev, ETV Bharat reported. Before he left the cage, Yaqoob asked for the promotion’s lightweight world title.
He was born in 1998 in Murran, a village in Pulwama district in south Kashmir, and he has now won six fights in a row since losing his professional debut. BRAVE CF and the Kashmiri press bill him as the first professional MMA fighter from Kashmir. Since October 2025 he has been a member of Team Khabib at the American Kickboxing Academy (AKA), training under Khabib Nurmagomedov and head coach Javier Mendez. He competes at lightweight, where the limit is 155 lb (70.3 kg), and his recent international bouts have been made at a 68 kg catchweight. He has never fought at flyweight.
The result matters beyond one card in Bulgaria because of the road it came down. India’s two landmark MMA results of the past four years came out of one domestic system: Matrix Fight Night (MFN), then the UFC. Anshul Jubli got there by winning the UFC’s Road to UFC lightweight tournament in February 2023; Puja Tomar signed after holding MFN’s strawweight title and beat Rayanne dos Santos at UFC Louisville in June 2024. Yaqoob started in that system, too. His debut, and his only loss, came on an MFN card. Then he left it. His six wins since have come in Noida, Kazakhstan, Panchkula, China, Uzbekistan and Bulgaria, the last three for BRAVE Combat Federation, the Bahrain-based promotion, and all three inside the first round.
That is a second route out of India, and he has walked it from a region with little MMA infrastructure, building some of his own, starting with an academy in Pulwama that he has said he borrowed money to open. Whether the route leads to a world title, or to the UFC he says he wants, is what the next year will settle.
Four minutes in Burgas
BRAVE CF sold the fight as a meeting of camps. Its pre-fight copy, published on 13 July, described Georgiev as one of Ilia Topuria’s primary sparring partners at Climent Club and set the bout inside the wider rivalry between Team Topuria and Team Khabib, which has sharpened with talk of a Topuria–Islam Makhachev super-fight. Georgiev came in at 3–0. Yaqoob came in at 5–1, ranked fifth at lightweight by the promotion, according to Lowkick MMA’s report of the night.
Lowkick’s account of the finish has him dropping Georgiev with a left hook to the temple and closing it with a flurry of punches. Sherdog logs a TKO at 4:00 of round one. “I want a belt for India,” Yaqoob said afterwards, according to ETV Bharat, and he called out the reigning champion, Abdisalam “Omok” Uulu Kubanychbek of Kyrgyzstan. BRAVE CF’s own write-up the next day said the promotion had not confirmed whether it would grant the fight.
The week behind the result came out only once he was home. In Pulwama on 4 August, where family, supporters and local residents met him, he said, as reported by the Daily Excelsior, that he had fought through leg and shoulder injuries, a fever and a cold, a rapid cut from 75 kg to 68 kg, and a cut to his hand before the bout. ETV Bharat reported him describing a 40-hour journey to Bulgaria and two days without sleep. By his account, he had kept all of it to himself before the fight.
The ledger
The record begins with its only blemish. On 31 March 2023, at Matrix Fight Night 11 in New Delhi, Neeraj Panghal caught him in a guillotine choke at 1:24 of the third round. Eleven months later he was back on an MFN card, at the Noida Indoor Stadium, and took a unanimous decision over Afghanistan’s Mohammad Azim Mokhlis. In December 2024 he went to Semey, in Kazakhstan, and outpointed Amanzhol Khaisa at Naiza FC 70, his first professional win outside India.
The finishes started in April 2025 at Veswa Fight Championship 4 in Panchkula, with a second-round stoppage of Shetty Pratik Sadashiv. Then came the platform jump. At BRAVE CF 98 in Zhengzhou, China, in September 2025, he stopped the Philippines’ Ian Paul Lora in the first round, the first BRAVE CF win by a fighter from Jammu and Kashmir. In Bukhara, Uzbekistan, in December, a late change of opponent made no difference: Zukhriddin Gafurov withdrew, Turkey’s Mehmet Can Tasdoven stepped in, and Tasdoven was stopped with knees and punches inside a minute and a half.
| Date | Opponent · promotion · method | Result |
|---|---|---|
| 31 Mar 2023 | Neeraj PanghalMatrix Fight Night 11 · New DelhiSubmission (guillotine) · R3 1:24 | L |
| 9 Mar 2024 | Mohammad Azim MokhlisMatrix Fight Night 14 · NoidaUnanimous decision | W |
| 21 Dec 2024 | Amanzhol KhaisaNaiza FC 70 · Semey, KazakhstanUnanimous decision | W |
| 19 Apr 2025 | Shetty Pratik SadashivVeswa FC 4 · PanchkulaTKO (punches) · R2 1:45 | W |
| 19 Sep 2025 | Ian Paul LoraBRAVE CF 98 · Zhengzhou, ChinaTKO (punches) · R1 1:54 | W |
| 23 Dec 2025 | Mehmet Can TasdovenBRAVE CF 103 · Bukhara, UzbekistanTKO (knee and punches) · R1 1:25 | W |
| 1 Aug 2026 | Delyan GeorgievBRAVE CF 107 · Burgas, BulgariaTKO (punches) · R1 4:00 | W |
Read across the rows and the trajectory is plain: two decisions to rebuild, then stoppages; Indian cards, then Central Asia, then a global promotion. The clock tells the same story. His first three professional fights lasted 41 minutes 24 seconds between them. His last three, all on BRAVE CF cards, lasted 7 minutes 19 seconds combined.
Coached by a screen
Before any of that, there was nobody to teach him. In a March 2021 interview with the Kashmir Monitor, after he had taken silver at the fourth MMA India National Championships in Lucknow, he described learning the sport from fight footage: Khabib Nurmagomedov’s bouts for grappling and ground-and-pound, Conor McGregor’s for striking and kickboxing, slowed down so he could study the technique. Neither man had trained him. The paper put the word “coaches” in quotation marks.
That Lucknow tournament, held from 19 to 21 February 2021, is also the cleanest early evidence of his division history. He was a welterweight then, and he led the final on points through two rounds against Zarmawai of Mizoram before being pinned against the cage in the third. The field was 223 athletes from 22 states and three union territories. He told the Monitor his corner was almost empty while rivals had coaches and teams; that officials at the J&K Sports Council had told him there were no funds; and that he had borrowed money to start his academy, Lion’s Den, and was still repaying it. He is the eldest son, the paper reported, and helps care for an ailing father. No response from the Sports Council to his account has been located.
The academy’s dates do not line up across the record, and ISJ is leaving the conflict visible. Recent profiles, including Revsportz and Brut, give its founding year as 2015; the 2021 Monitor interview said he had started it the previous year. Its size grows in every account: 55 students in 2021, 40 to 50 trainees by Kashmir Reader’s count in February 2024, and more than 200 young athletes trained according to Revsportz this month. Those figures may be measuring different things.
He came to combat sport around 2013 through taekwondo and Thang-Ta, the Manipuri weapon art, and the amateur haul that followed is large. Three national amateur MMA titles before he turned professional are reported by Wikipedia, BRAVE CF and The Free Press Journal. The wider totals, 11 national golds, six national silvers and 17 state titles across disciplines, circulate from profile to profile and trace back to his own count. The Free Press Journal also reports a bronze in full-contact eskrima, the Filipino stick-fighting art, at the 2022 WEKAF World Championship in the Philippines.
Inside Team Khabib
“Trains under Khabib” is a phrase that fight marketing in India uses loosely. In Yaqoob’s case it is documented, and the documentation has two dates.
The first is July 2023, four months after the debut loss, when he went to Russia to train in the Nurmagomedov system under Islam Makhachev, by his own account. The second is October 2025, when footage of his Team Khabib tryout circulated and the team voted him in.
The vote. Admission to Team Khabib was put to a vote of the team. Yaqoob’s tryout and vote, in late 2025, were reported by Bloody Elbow on 21 October 2025 and by Sherdog the next day; BRAVE CF says the camp voted unanimously, while Sherdog reported that part of the team voted in favour.
The words. Khabib Nurmagomedov publicly called him “a beautiful person” and praised him for never missing training and always being on time, as BRAVE CF, Bloody Elbow and Sherdog reported. By Sherdog’s account, Khabib then pointed to his cousin Usman Nurmagomedov, who five years earlier had not believed he would win in Bellator.
The Dagestan link. In July 2023 he enrolled at the Nurmagomedov school in Russia, saying of Islam Makhachev: “He will train me for the next two months.”
What it is not. Team membership is a training affiliation under Khabib and head coach Javier Mendez, not a promotional contract. His promoter is BRAVE CF.
What the membership gives him is access to the system that produced Khabib, and a story that BRAVE CF has been glad to market. Before Burgas, Yaqoob told the promotion what it meant to him:
“Joining Team Khabib is one of the proudest moments of my career.”
He also said, in the same piece, that he did not want to let Khabib, his coaches or his teammates down. On 1 August he did not.
What it means for Indian MMA
India’s professional MMA scene is young enough that its pathways can still be counted. Matrix Fight Night, founded in 2019 by Tiger, Ayesha and Krishna Shroff, staged its first event in Mumbai that March and its 18th in Greater Noida on 2 May this year. Jubli and Tomar both came through it. Jubli made his professional debut at MFN 2 in 2019 and won the Road to UFC Season 1 lightweight final over Jeka Saragih on 4 February 2023, earning a contract; he has lost at UFC 294 and UFC 312 since. Tomar held MFN’s strawweight title, signed with the UFC and won a split decision over dos Santos on 8 June 2024. That win was widely reported in India as the first by an Indian fighter in the UFC. BRAVE CF’s own rankings describe her as the first Indian woman to win a UFC bout, a distinction that turns on whether Jubli’s Road to UFC final, fought on a UFC card, counts.
Yaqoob’s significance is that his momentum has been built outside that funnel. BRAVE CF was founded in Bahrain in 2016 by Sheikh Khalid bin Hamad Al Khalifa and has history with India: it staged BRAVE CF 5 in Mumbai in 2017 and two cards in Hyderabad, in 2018 and 2019. On 30 July it published a ranking of India’s top fighters that placed Yaqoob first, ahead of Road to UFC semi-finalist Chungreng Koren, Jubli, Tomar and the MFN title winners Digamber Singh Rawat and Sanjeet Budhwar. It is a promotion ranking its own fighter, and it should be read that way. The Gulf Daily News, in Bahrain, ran the same ranking on 9 August. Carlos Kremer, the cage announcer who was the first inductee into BRAVE CF’s Hall of Fame, said after the event: “He’s not just winning fights. He’s showing what’s possible for Indian MMA.”
| Stage | Fighter · route | Marker |
|---|---|---|
| UFC | Anshul JubliMFN debut 2019 · won Road to UFC Season 1 lightweight final, 4 Feb 2023 · lost at UFC 294 and UFC 312 | UFC contract |
| UFC | Puja TomarMFN strawweight champion · split-decision win over Rayanne dos Santos, UFC Louisville, 8 Jun 2024 | UFC win |
| RTU | Chungreng KorenManipur · MFN · reached Road to UFC Season 5 semi-finals, missing weight for that bout | RTU semi-final |
| MFN | Digamber Singh RawatMFN lightweight champion, unbeaten at 5–0 | MFN title |
| MFN | Sanjeet BudhwarHaryana · MFN’s inaugural featherweight champion, 11–2 | MFN title |
| BRAVE | Owais YaqoobMFN → Naiza FC → Veswa FC → BRAVE CF · six straight wins | 6–1 |
The market case is harder to pin down, because the numbers come from interested parties. BRAVE CF said on 8 August that BRAVE CF 107 drew 3,684,125 live views across YouTube and its own BRAVE TV service and 200.2 million views of related content on social media. The release was headlined as an Indian viewership surge, but it gives no methodology and does not say how much of either figure came from India. Yaqoob’s own estimate, reported by Rising Kashmir, was that nearly 1.6 million people in India watched live despite the late hour. Neither figure is independently measured; both are printed here as claims. BRAVE CF and the Gulf Daily News put his Instagram following above one million. A sponsor is already attached: Cemtac Cements, which issued a statement from Srinagar in December congratulating him as its brand ambassador.
The regional response has been quick. On 3 August the office of Jammu and Kashmir’s chief minister, Omar Abdullah, congratulated him on X on what it called a “remarkable achievement” at BRAVE CF 107. In 2021, by his account, the J&K Sports Council had told him there were no funds. The two statements are five years apart.
What comes next
The title picture is not simple. Kubanychbek is the champion Yaqoob called out, but Wikipedia’s record of the promotion also lists Georgia’s Raul Tutarauli as interim lightweight champion since October 2025, and BRAVE CF has confirmed nothing. Fight databases show no next MMA bout. What he has announced is a grappling contest in Istanbul later this month, where he expects to compete alongside UFC fighters, according to the Daily Excelsior.
The UFC remains a stated goal rather than a booking. “I aim to compete in the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), and for that, I am building my record,” he told Kashmir Reader in February 2024. He is not signed to the UFC and has never competed on Road to UFC. Three things would change how this story is told: a booked BRAVE CF title fight, a UFC or Road to UFC contract, or a first defeat since 2023.
Five years ago the Kashmir Monitor described his only “coaches” as fight videos, slowed down. Last October, the man in those videos called him a beautiful person in front of the room. The UFC is still an ambition. The distance he has already covered, from Murran to that room, is not.
On 17 August, Kashmir Life reported that Chief Minister Omar Abdullah had felicitated Yaqoob with a cash award of ₹1 lakh in recognition of his international performances.
As of 28 October, Sherdog, UFCalendar and BestFightOdds list no MMA bout for him after BRAVE CF 107 and no booked fight; his record stands at 6–1. ISJ could not verify whether the Istanbul grappling appearance took place, or any BRAVE CF decision on a title fight.
Sourcing and corrections. Built on ISJ’s August 2026 research file (the 24-page dossier and the nine-slide carousel) and re-checked on 28 October 2026 against Sherdog, Wikipedia, BRAVE CF, ETV Bharat, Daily Excelsior, Kashmir Monitor, Kashmir Reader, Kashmir Life, The Free Press Journal, Lowkick MMA, Gulf Daily News and UFCalendar. ISJ’s original commissioning brief named the fighter “Owais Rahoo” and called him a flyweight; no fighter of that name exists in any record, and he has never fought at flyweight. He competes as Owais Yaqoob; his personal name, Ovais Ahmad, appears on weigh-in graphics and as his Instagram display name. The carousel’s slide 02 called Thang-Ta “Kashmir’s own sword-and-shield art”; it is a Manipuri art, corrected here. ISJ’s dossier carried the MFN 14 venue as the UAE, from an older Wikipedia table; Kashmir Reader’s pre-fight report and the current table place it at the Noida Indoor Stadium.
Flag: conflicting records. The Lion’s Den founding year (2015 in later profiles; 2020 by the 2021 interview) and its size (55, 40–50, 200+) conflict. The BRAVE CF 103 date (21 December on Sherdog; 23 December on BRAVE CF and Wikipedia), the Lora stoppage (1:54 on Sherdog and Wikipedia; 3:06 in BRAVE CF’s own results; TKO or “submission to punches”) and the Georgiev time (4:00; UFCalendar has 4:02) vary by source. Resolved on the 28 October recheck: the Tasdoven time is shown as 1:25, the time in BRAVE CF’s official results and on Sherdog (Wikipedia has 1:24), and the clock totals were recomputed (7:19; 8:31 with Lora at 3:06). In early August, Sherdog’s and Wikipedia’s summary boxes still showed 4–1; Sherdog now shows 6–1, while Wikipedia’s infobox still shows 4–1. Wikipedia’s lead, which in August called him the first professional MMA fighter from Jammu and Kashmir, now calls him the first from Murran village; the copy attributes the “first from Kashmir” billing to BRAVE CF and the Kashmiri press instead. The Team Khabib vote is “unanimous” in BRAVE CF’s account and “part of the team” in Sherdog’s. Georgiev’s age was cut: no source for it was located. He was nominated for BRAVE CF’s 2025 Breakout Fighter award in January and won the fan vote, announced on 8 February; some outlets still describe him only as a nominee. His age is given as 27 or 28.
Flag: claims, not measurements. The 1.6 million Indian live audience is his own estimate (Rising Kashmir, as recorded in ISJ’s dossier; the article was not re-located on recheck, but the Daily Excelsior’s 4 August report carries the same estimate in his words, “around 1.6 million”). BRAVE CF’s 3,684,125 live views and 200.2 million social views are promotion-reported, without methodology. The medal totals beyond his three national amateur titles are self-reported; an “AIMMAF second-best in India” designation is self-reported and was left out. The J&K Sports Council account is his alone, and no response was located. BRAVE CF’s India ranking is a promotion ranking its own fighter. The interim-champion listing rests on Wikipedia alone. The 2022 eskrima bronze is reported by The Free Press Journal; the carousel marked it self-reported.
Flag: quotes. Khabib Nurmagomedov’s fuller remark, as carried by Bloody Elbow on 21 October 2025, is in ISJ’s dossier; the Bloody Elbow page could not be reopened on recheck, so only the phrase confirmed by BRAVE CF (“a beautiful person”) is quoted. Sherdog’s 22 October 2025 report carries his remarks on punctuality, training and Usman Nurmagomedov, but not that phrase. The Usman line was corrected on recheck: in Sherdog’s quotation it is Usman who had not believed he would win in Bellator. The chief minister’s statement is quoted only for the phrase “remarkable achievement”, as carried by Kashmir Despatch; “remarkable victory” there is the paper’s paraphrase. The ₹1 lakh award is dated by Kashmir Life’s 17 August report (“on Monday”, which was 17 August); he had also been felicitated, with no amount stated, at the 10 August sports cash-awards ceremony in Srinagar (Kashmir Life; Daily Pioneer).
