By September 2004, a new NSA technique enabled the agency to find cellphones even when they were turned off. JSOC troops called this "The Find," and it gave them thousands of new targets, including members of a burgeoning al-Qaeda-sponsored insurgency in Iraq, according to members of the unit.
Google decided to get into the action themselves with Android 15, but that's just counting what's built into the OS, not the chipsets themselves.
https://techbriefly.com/2024/03/15/android-15-powered-off-fi...
Remember the "NSA can track phones when turned off" was from 2003.
Try to remember 2003, then adjust your memories to match the reality for an impoverished Iraqi.
My guess is that because they controlled the cellular network they pushed out an OTA firmware that made it so the phones didn't actually turn off but went into one of the ARM7TDMI's low power modes where it would wake up periodically and ping a tower before going back to sleep without turning on the screen. Those modes used so little power you wouldn't notice a difference in overall battery life.
This would be trivially detectable by any party with a $10 SDR dongle in 2025.
It's also supposedly something US JSOC is involved with, which is more like IRL Call of Duty group of people than black suited 007 or drone trailer people, so my intuition is that the system is more likely to look like a hearbeat sensor attachment than a cloud based offering.
Plausible, even. The range would be very limited.
But we both know what everyone thinks is happening.