The teenage refugee who escaped Aleppo in a wheelchair

A Syrian refugee who escaped Aleppo in a wheelchair has told of her incredible journey from the war-torn country to safety in Germany.

Appearing on ITV's This Morning, Nujeen Mustafa told of her 3,500 mile journey with her sister, Nisreen, to be reunited with their brother Bland, in Germany.

The pair travelled on foot from the Turkish/Syrian border to the coastal town of Bodrum, where they paid smugglers to take them on a dangerously overcrowded dinghy to the Greek island of Lesbos.

From there it had been a 14-hour ferry ride to Piraeus on the Greek mainland, followed by a bus journey across Macedonia to the Serbian/Hungarian border, and after many weeks of travelling the pair finally arrived in Germany in September 2015.

The 18-year-old's condition means that she cannot walk, and so it was up to her older sister to push her wheelchair.

Nujeen described the journey as an "awesome adventure", allowing her to see many of the things she never had, confined to a fifth-floor apartment in Aleppo with no stairs.

However, the journey was far from easy, and the largely self-educated teenager told how the most difficult part of her journey was watching other refugees getting stuck at border crossings.

"I felt like they considered us an epidemic or a disease that they fear is going to spread among them," Nujeen said.

She continued: "It's important that you know that leaving was not a choice, I would gladly go back home if I had the chance.

"We are leaving because we are dying, not because we want to."

She reiterated: "Coming to Europe is not a choice, it's something we are forced to do... If we had a safer country, we would stay at home."

And Syria is somewhere she hopes to be able to go back to in the future, along with studying physics at university and becoming an astronaut.

The teenager dreams of going into space because "it would give me everything I ever wanted," she explains.

Becoming an astronaut would stretch her mentally, as well as providing her with "stillness and quietness," two things not experienced in the civil-war tearing Syria apart.

If she cannot become an astronaut, Nujeen said she would like a career as an author, a goal she is already on the way to achieving, with her book - written with Christina Lamb - The girl from Aleppo: Nujeen's escape from war to freedom, out on Thursday.