Every morning, 28-year-old Zainab Fayez puts on a blue burkha and walks through multiple checkpoints to get to her heavily fortified office in Kandahar, southern Afghanistan. Finally inside, she takes off the burkha but leaves a scarf on to cover her face and hair in the otherwise all-male office. Fayez is the first and only female prosecutor in the volatile province of Kandahar, working in the attorney general’s office of Kandahar’s appellate court.

In only two years, Fayez has fought more than 50 cases related to violence against women and has put 21 men behind bars in this conservative part of the country. On the day she’s visited by a reporter for Women in the World, two women have arrived to meet with her — a mother and her 18-year-old daughter, Nazia. They have come to file a complaint about Nazia’s violent husband who beats her.

Cases like Nazia’s land on Fayez’s desk daily. Seventeen years after the fall of the Taliban, an extremist regime particularly oppressive toward women, domestic violence is still common in Afghanistan, particularly in the conservative south.

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