A novel approach for the synchronization of a class of chaotic systems with uncertainty, unknown time delays, and external disturbances is presented. The control method given here is expressed by combining sliding mode control approaches with adaptive rules. A sliding surface of fractional order has been developed to construct the control strategy of the abovementioned sliding mode by employing the structure of nonlinear fractional PID (NLPID) controllers. The suggested control mechanism using Lyapunov’s theorem developed robust adaptive rules in such a way that the estimation error of the system’s unknown parameters and time delays tends to be zero. Furthermore, the proposed robust control approach’s stability has been demonstrated using Lyapunov stability criteria and Lipschitz conditions. Then, in order to assess the performance of the proposed mechanism, the presented control approach was used to simulate the synchronization of two chaotic jerk systems with uncertainty, unknown time delays, and external distortion. The results of the simulation confirm the robust and desirable synchronization performance. Finally, a secure communications mechanism based on the proposed technique is shown as a practical implementation of the introduced control strategy, in which the message signal is disguised in the transmitter with high security and well recovered in the receiver with high quality, according to the mean squared error (MES) criteria.