Senior US officials met with members of a Syrian opposition party on Thursday to assess the situation in the Arab country, The Washington Post reported Saturday.

The Bush administration is reaching out to the Syrian opposition because of growing concerns that unrest in Lebanon could spill over and suddenly destabilize Syria, the report said.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in an exclusive interview with the Post on Friday that the US officials' meeting with the Syrian opposition "is to assess the situation so that nobody is blindsided, because events are moving so fast and in such unpredictable directions that it is only prudent at this point to know what's going on."

The Thursday's meeting, according to the newspaper, was hosted by the US State Department and brought together senior administration officials from Vice President Cheney's office, the National Security Council and the Pentagon and about a dozen prominent Syrian Americans, including political activists, community leaders, academics and an opposition group, the newspaper reported, quoting a senior State Department official as saying.

The opposition group comes from the Syria Reform Party, a smallU.S.-based Syrian organization.

The paper said that the US outreach is a direct result of US President George W. Bush's discussion last month with French President Jacques Chirac.

The French president told Bush that the Syrian government was unlikely to survive the withdrawal of Syrian forces from Lebanon and predicted that free elections in Lebanon would in turn force change inside Syria, possibly unraveling Assad's government, the paper quoted US sources as saying.

Analysts familiar with the US thinking said that since that meeting with Chirac, the Bush administration has begun looking at possible political options in Syria, the paper said.