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The site 5elafabook.com, which resembled
Facebook but appeared unfinished, went live on Sunday then went
offline again a day later and its linked Twitter account was
shut down.
A message in English posted on its front page said it had
temporarily suspended operations to "protect the information and
details of its members and their safety".
Islamic State, which had declared its own caliphate in territory
captured in Iraq and Syria, has relied heavily on social media
to spread messages and publicize military victories and its
beheadings of prisoners.
But mainstream social media companies have raced to remove links
to footage of killings -- and many governments have called for
stronger restrictions on militants' use of the Internet.
It was unclear who created 5elafabook.com -- a name based on an
English transliteration of the Arabic word for caliphate 'khelafa'
-- or how many members it attracted.
The message posted on the front page said it was independent and
not sponsored by Islamic State.
But it went on to say the militant group was expanding across
the whole world "by Allah's permission". The original website
showed a map of the world dotted with Islamic State's trademark
Arabic insignia.
Data online showed it had been built using Socialkit, a program
that lets users produce do-it-yourself social networks. The site
was registered with webservices company GoDaddy.com on March 3
and cited its home address as IS-controlled Mosul in Iraq but
its home country as Egypt with an apparently false phone number
there.
Islamic State supporters held a debate in a separate web forum
on whether platforms like 5elafabook could be trusted or whether
they could be used by IS's enemies to gain intelligence,
according to the militancy watchdog SITE Intelligence Group.
"There is no secure website, even if it did belong directly to
the Islamic State, because the servers are controlled by the
governments, which can take all the IP addresses of those who
visited the website," said a user calling himself Taqni Minbar.
The message on 5elafabook.com said the site's main purpose "was
to clarify to the whole world that we do not only carry guns and
live in caves as they imagine ... We advance with our world and
we want advancement to become Islamic."
It added: "We love to die as you love to live and we promise to
fight until the last one of us."
(Reporting by Noah Browning and Marius Bosch; Editing by
Clarence Fernandez)
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