Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA)/AFPA UN report detailing the "massive and systematized" violence perpetrated by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad against his own people "shatters the notion that the regime is somehow a lesser evil" than the Islamic State. That is according to Emile Hokayem, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, who said Tuesday on Twitter that the report is "inconvenient" for those who argue that Assad should stay in power for the sake of creating stability and defeating ISIS and Al Qaeda. The report concluded that widespread and systematic torture at the hands of the Assad regime — which, according to a Syrian government defector codenamed "Caesar," had killed over 10,000 people as of July 2014 — amounts to "extermination as a crime against humanity." "The accumulated custodial deaths were brought about by inflicting life conditions in a calculated awareness that such conditions would cause mass deaths of detainees in the ordinary course of events," the report said, "and occurred in the pursuance of a State policy to attack a civilian population." Russia, a staunch Assad ally, has sought to depict the regime as a bulwark of peace and stability against the so-called "terrorists" whose threaten Assad's power.