The term "Byzantine" would not even begin to describe the present situation in Syria.
Rudyard Kipling may well have had a point, when he penned the following lines:
Now, it is not good for the Christian’s health to hustle the Aryan brown,
For the Christian riles, and the Aryan smiles, and he weareth the Christian down;
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white, with the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear: ‘A fool lies here who tried to hustle the East.’
There does certainly seem to be a long list of well intentioned Westerners - but fools nonetheless - who have come to grief whilst trying to "hustle the East". (With the "East" in this context meaning all of the Asian continent, regardless of its religious affiliations).