Azerbaijan is close to agreement with the United States on the establishment of a US military presence following the eviction of American forces from Uzbekistan, a Russian newspaper said Wednesday. \"A decision wanted by Washington has almost ripened,\" the Nezavisimaya Gazeta newspaper quoted an unnamed source close to Azerbaijan\'s foreign ministry as saying. The president of the strategic Caspian country, Ilham Aliyev, \"in the end will give his agreement to the deployment in the country of an American military contingent,\" the source said. Last week the ex-Soviet Central Asian state of Uzbekistan announced it was giving the United States 180 days to close an air base there used to support operations in nearby Afghanistan. Nezavisimaya Gazeta said the question of stationing US forces in Azerbaijan was on the agenda of the country\'s foreign minister, Elmar Mamedyarov, who was in Washington this week for talks with senior administration officials. In talks at the Pentagon, Mamedyarov would discuss \"not only general prospects for military cooperation... but an extremely concrete question -- the possibility of transferring the American base from Uzbekistan to Azerbaijan,\" the newspaper said, summarising the views of unnamed analysts. In response to Wednesday\'s report, a spokesman for Azerbaijan\'s defence ministry, Ramiz Melikov, told AFP the ministry had \"not held any discussions regarding this issue.\" \"According to the constitution of Azerbaijan, there can be no bases of other states on the territory of the country. But if such a decision were to be taken it would be made by the president and we have not received any such information,\" Melikov said. Nezavisimaya Gazeta cited a source in the Azerbaijani security forces as saying that a team of US military instructors was already in Azerbaijan looking at two possible sites for hosting the US military, one close to the capital Baku and the other close to the border with Iran. (AFP)