Nigerian officials blamed the terror attack on St. Francis Catholic Church in Owo, Ondo State, on the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) while avoiding references to networks of politically powerful herdsmen, Knoxville News Sentinel reports.
According to a senior fellow at the Religious Freedom Institute in Washington DC, Stephen Rasche, Nigerian Christians no longer trust their own government or the leaders of the United States and the European Union.
On the Owo massacre, Rasche said, “These types of murders are taking place weekly, almost daily, in Nigeria — murders of innocent Christians, being gunned down, slaughtered indiscriminately, throughout the north and, increasingly, into the central part of Nigeria and into the south.”
On how the Nigerian Christians are reacting, he said many of them simply “throw up their hands,” because they no longer trust their own government or the leaders of the United States and the European Union.
“They don’t look at us as being serious about any of these things,” he said.
“They are completely disillusioned that the US government is going to have any kind of effective role to play. They’ve just given up that anybody in the West is going to come to their aid,” he added.