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The dolls, which cannot be bought or sold for profit, were inspired by and named after Master Cpl. Mark Isfeld of No. 1 Combat Engineer Regiment who was serving on peacekeeping missions in Kuwait and Croatia in the early 1990s. There, he often came across children with no toys or personal possessions, so his mother, Carol Isfeld, knitted little woollen dolls that he could give away to the kids he met.

Isfeld was killed in Croatia in 1994 while removing landmines, and his mother has since died. But the legacy of the Izzy dolls lives on.

While in Kabul, Afghanistan, combat engineer Cpl. James Oakley was used to handling dangerous tasks, but a few days before Christmas, his team’s mission was to go into a local village and give out Izzy dolls to children.

“At first the children were nervous about approaching us as we came into their village, but once they saw the dolls poking out from the top of the boxes we were carrying, we were all but mobbed by excited young Afghans holding out their little hands, calling out, ‘Mister, mister!’,” Oakley wrote in a testimonial.

“Before I realized it, the box was empty and there were dozens of happy little faces milling around, enjoying their new treasures.”

The dolls — made either as boys with the peacekeepers’ UN blue berets or girl dolls with braids and a floppy hat — are to be about six inches tall and kept light so they are easy for soldiers to carry in their pockets.

There is a design on the website knitters can follow, but volunteers are free to make their own version, too. Typically they are made out of scrap or donated wool and take about three hours to make.