The New People's Army is the armed wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines, founded on 29 March 1969 by Bernabe Buscayno. The group assassinated Colonel James N. Rowe of the US Army and carried out guerrilla warfare against the government of the Philippines, and its long struggle was funded by its "revolutionary taxes" collected from people in occupied areas as well as by money and weapons from North Korea and China. With a height of 26,000 fighters in the 1980s, the NPA declined in the following decades and had only 3,200 fighters at the end of 2014.