If you read the story, you would have seen that IDF regulations of course permit peyos and they were not compelled by policy to have them cut, but, if the report is accurate, by one rosho who should be kicked out of the army.
As I wrote in the comments below the story, it is a terrible irony that if these recruits had any familiarity with tzahal and bakum, like those, for example, learning in hesder yeshivos do, they would have been familiar enough to know its NOT IDF policy. What a ashame they didn’t have the kind of guidance that would have made such knowledge obvious, as it is to the rest of the religious Jews in the IDF.