The purpose of this paper is to study the effect of the cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTLs) on an HIV-1 dynamics. The model considers that the virus infects the macrophages in addition to the CD4+ T cells. The role of the CTLs is to kill the infected macrophages and CD4+ T cells. The time delay which accounts the time of infection and the time of producing new active HIV-1 is modeled. The HIV-1 dynamics is modeled as a 6-dimensional nonlinear delay differential equations. The incidence rate of infection and killer rate of infected cells are given by general nonlinear functions. We study the qualitative behavior of the system. The global stability analysis has been established using Lyapunov method and LaSalle invariance principle. We present an example and perform numerical simulations to emphasize our theoretical results.